What better way to spend the morning this long weekend–a few minutes out to study and share this work which I have done before but keep returning to it.

This elegant painting depicts an interior scene of a palace with a group of three European ladies seated on chairs while a fourth lady, perhaps their attendant, reads to them while seated on a stool. The grandly dressed ladies are clearly European noblewomen. Though this is an eighteenth-century painting, the clothes they wear are seventeenth-century or earlier in date, with the collar ruffs and the fringed doublets. Placed before them is a table of gold vessels with refreshments. Two dogs frolic in the foreground while at the back a cat lurks at a safe distance. The architecture and furnishings as well as the presence of two Indian attendants in the background suggest that the European ladies are visiting India.

Hyderabad Deccan circa 1750. Opaque watercolor heightened with gold on paper.