99. 99W A large painted wood figure of Kamadhenu, the goddess of plenty South India, Trichinopoly, 19th/ 20th Century carved and overlaid with cloth, painted in polychrome 72 cm. high Kamadhenu (also known as Surabhi) is the mother of all cows, the cow of plenty who provides her owner with whatever they seek. In the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata Purana, Kamadhenu and her calf lived with the sage Jamadagni in his hermitage, where they were captured by the thousand-armed king Kartavirya Arjuna and then rescued by Parashurama. Kamadhenu can also be depicted with a hybrid body, as here, composed of the head of a woman, the body of a cow with the wings of an eagle, and the tail of a peacock. A similar figure of Kamadhenu from Trichinopoly is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IM.417.1923). For a painting of the sage Vasistha seated with Kamadhenu, South India, Mysore, first half of the 19th Century, see Oliver Forge & Brendan Lynch, Indian Painting 1580-1850, 2013, pp. 70-71, no. 41; and for a Tanjore painting of the same subject, see Christie's, Arts of India, 25th May 2017, lot 88.