is embossed with flowers, painted generally on a green ground, and lighted up with gold [Plate 67].
The lacquer work of Sazvantwadi is applied to native toys, such as models of hand-mills, weights and measures, cooking utensils, and vessels for eating and drinking, and to the peculiar fans of the country, and Hindu playing cards. These last are circular, and being painted with mythological subjects in bright colours, are most pleasing objects, and interesting also as illus- trating the state of the art of painting in India, in districts where it has remained uninfluenced by European teaching and example.
In Mysore , and elsewhere in the Dakhan, there is a sort of lacquer-ware in which the ground is painted in transparent green on tinfoil, and the subjects, generally mythological, being painted on this shining background in the brightest opaque colours, the effect has almost the briniancy of the jewelled enamels of Jeypur. Several examples of it are exhibited in the India Museum. One, a box, is painted on the two sides with all the guardians of the eight quarters of the world in procession : — Indra, Agni, Yama, and Nirritu on one side ; and Varuna, Vayu or Pavana, Kuvera, and Isana on the other. At the two ends are scenes from Krishna's life, his hiding in a tree with the gopis' clothes at one end, and his triumph over the serpent Kaliya at the other. On the panel of the cover are Brahma and Saraswati, attended by Hanuman, the monkey king, and Jambavat, the king of the bears, in the centre, and Siva and Krishna and Vishnu and their wives, on either side of them : while round the rim of the cover runs the perpetual sport of Krishna with the gopis .
