Raja Sansar Chand and his son Anirudh Chand worshipping images of Shiva and Parvati, attributed to the Guler artist Khushala, India, Kangra, circa 1795

J.P. Losty, Mystical Realm of Love Pahari Paintings from the Eva and Konrad Seitz Collection, London, 2017, p.356, no.102

Here Sansar Chand and his young son Anirudh Chand are shown venerating the deities within the private setting of the palace. The deities are placed within a pandal upon a red carpet with garlands of flowers hanging down. Three male companions stand behind and two attendants wave chowries over the images, whilst a priest dressed in purple is seated on the floor, surrounded by candelabras.

The silver and gold faces and the attributes correspond to the nearly life-sized deities found in the Gauri Shankar temple at Sujanpur Tira built by Sansar Chand in 1793. Anirudh is shown at a similar age in a painting dated 1796 of Sansar Chand walking with his son, from the William Moorcroft collection in the Victoria & Albert Museum (Archer 1973, p.201, no.18). Another painting showing Anirudh Chand at a Krishna janmashtami celebration at the age of ten is in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Museum, Mumbai (see Khandalavala 1958, fig.81).

The dating of this painting to the last decade of the eighteenth-century is further supported by the decoration seen on the shawls. The pallu of the shawls show stylised sprays of flowers rather than the formal cone buta that appeared from the early nineteenth century onwards (see Irwin 1973, p.11).