Fluted Bidri Hookah Base

India (Deccan, Bidar), circa 1775

Height: 16 cm
Diameter: 14.5 cm

A bell-shaped bidri hookah base with vertically fluted sides, a dentated ridged shoulder and a rounded base, decorated in silver inlays of floral motifs and foliate vines. The flaring mouth has a serrated rim and a protruding flange at the base, below which the narrow neck is ornamented by a chevron collar. The shoulder has an elaborate treatment of five concentric ever-widening circles of designs. Just below the chevron collar is a ring of buds, then a frieze of petals framed by a thin border of squares, followed by a wide band of scrolling flowers and leaves related to the blossoming vines in the flutes. The shoulder if finished with an edge of dentated petals in relief that overlap with the flutes that emerge below, from between the tips of the petals.

The body of the hookah base is decorated to spectacular effect with thirty flutes. The top part of each flute sits recessed below the petals of the shoulder but at the bottom the flutes float, seeming to lift in relief above the surface of the hookah base. The flutes are decorated with two alternating floral designs, a rising stack of flowers and a scrolling vine of nodding flowers. The rounded base is decorated with closely related floral motifs.

A bell-shaped hookah base of similar fluted form is illustrated in Jagdish Mittal, Bidri Ware and Damascene work in Jagdish & Kamla Mittal Museum of Indian Art, 2011, pp. 110-111, no. 30. This has a slightly earlier type of decoration a to the flutes and has been dated by Mittal to circa 1750.

Provenance:

Spink and Son, London, 1998
Private American Collection

Exhibited:

Art of the Islamic World, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2015.