File:Indian - The Elephant King Attacked by the Crocodile - Walters W887.jpg
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Summary
editThe Elephant King Attacked by the Crocodile ( ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Title |
The Elephant King Attacked by the Crocodile |
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Description |
English: This picture is from a dispersed "Gajendramoksha" (Liberation of the Elephant-King) series. The myth's intent, like those that tell us of the avatars of Vishnu, is to demonstrate Vishnu's willingness always to help when invoked by a person or even an animal with sincere faith. Once, while a herd of elephants was cavorting in a river, their leader was attacked by a crocodile. The elephant immediately began calling Vishnu, and, so intense was the animal's faith that the god appeared on earth and saved him.
Here, an unknown artist has given us an expressive rendering of the vicious attack in a most imaginative manner. The elephants are drawn with telling realism, but the crocodile is purely a creature of fantasy and is dragon-like in appearance. The behavior of the elephants--a mother protects two babies, another feeds on lotuses, and others amble beyond the shoreline--reveals familiarity with the pachyderm, but the water, the rocks, and the sky are rendered conceptually, though with expressiveness. Most unusual is the simultaneous depiction of a cloudburst and a sunburst. The dark clouds with streaks of lightning send down sheets of rain, but they also clear the way for the sun to appear as a golden human head with golden rays riding a chariot drawn by white steeds. |
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Date |
circa 1650 date QS:P571,+1650-00-00T00:00:00Z/9,P1480,Q5727902 |
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Medium | pigments and gold on paper | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Dimensions |
height: 21.1 cm (8.3 in); width: 30.2 cm (11.8 in) dimensions QS:P2048,21.1U174728 dimensions QS:P2049,30.2U174728 |
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Collection |
institution QS:P195,Q210081 |
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Accession number |
W.887 |
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Place of creation | Ajmer, Rajasthan, India (?) | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Object history |
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Credit line | gift of John and Berthe Ford, 2001 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Source | Walters Art Museum: Home page Info about artwork | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Permission (Reusing this file) |
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Licensing
editThis file was provided to Wikimedia Commons by the Walters Art Museum as part of a cooperation project. All artworks in the photographs are in public domain due to age. The photographs of two-dimensional objects are also in the public domain. Photographs of three-dimensional objects and all descriptions have been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License.
In the case of the text descriptions, copyright restrictions only apply to longer descriptions which cross the threshold of originality.
العربيَّة | English | français | italiano | македонски | русский | sicilianu | +/− |
This is a faithful photographic reproduction of an original two-dimensional work of art. The work of art itself is in the public domain for the following reason:
This digital reproduction has been released under the following licenses:
In many jurisdictions, faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are not copyrightable. The Wikimedia Foundation's position is that these works are not copyrightable in the United States (see Commons:Reuse of PD-Art photographs). In these jurisdictions, this work is actually in the public domain and the requirements of the digital reproduction's license are not compulsory. |
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current | 03:41, 26 March 2012 | 1,239 × 884 (983 KB) | File Upload Bot (Kaldari) (talk | contribs) | == {{int:filedesc}} == {{Walters Art Museum artwork |artist = Indian |title = ''The Elephant King Attacked by the Crocodile'' |description = {{en|This picture is from a dispersed "Gajendramoksha" (Liberation of the Elephant-K... |
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