A Maratha Hunting Party

Edwin Lord Weeks was one of the most prolific American Orientalist painters of the late nineteenth century, spending years travelling through India, Persia, and Morocco in search of subject matter for a Western audience hungry for exotic spectacle. His Maratha Hunting Party depicts the equestrian culture of the Maratha aristocracy — a Hindu warrior class from western India — with the documentary interest of an ethnographer combined with the compositional training of a Salon painter. Weeks's Indian subjects were exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon in the 1880s and 1890s, where they competed with French Orientalist works on similar themes.

Weeks records the dust, heat-haze, and bright Indian light through a warm golden palette dominated by yellows, ochres, and siennas. The horses are rendered with the equestrian accuracy of a trained academic painter, while the background figures dissolve into loosely brushed crowd passages that suggest his awareness of Impressionist technique.