Rajput painting

style c. 1600-1850 Rajasthan Pahari hills

Rajput painting is the art of the regional Hindu courts of northern India from the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. The name is modern: Ananda Coomaraswamy coined it in his 1916 monograph on the Hindu paintings of Rajasthan and the Panjab Himalayas. It embraces two great families of schools - the Rajasthani centres of Mewar, Bundi, Kota, Bikaner, Marwar and Kishangarh, and the Pahari courts of the hills from Basohli to Kangra. Its roots lie in pre-Mughal Hindu manuscript painting, reshaped under Mughal influence without losing its own identity. Workshops were usually families rather than court-run karkhanas. Their gouache folios illustrate ragamala sets, the lives of Krishna and Rama, and poetic treatises on heroines and heroes; some courts also painted walls. Conservative idioms keep bright flat colour and abstract form, others turn cool and refined. The tradition faded in the nineteenth century.

Lead image of the Wikipedia article "Rajput painting".
Lead image of the Wikipedia article "Rajput painting".Public domain (credit: Shahadin) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Intense, flatly applied colour with bold bounding contour lines and little chiaroscuro
  • Profile faces with large almond eyes and idealized types rather than individual portraits
  • Continuous narration: several episodes of a story staged within a single picture
  • Gouache worked in layered coats and burnished to a soft lustre, with crisp outlined detail and applied gold
  • Poetic and devotional subjects: Krishna lila, ragamala couples, nayika heroines, raga personifications
  • A stylistic spectrum from bright abstraction (Mewar, Basohli) to cool naturalism (Kangra, Bikaner)

Key figures

  • Sahibdin (fl. 1628-1655) — Mewar's great painter - ragamala, Bhagavata Purana and the monumental Mewar Ramayana
  • Nainsukh (c. 1710-1778) — Guler and Jasrota master of the Seu-Nainsukh family whose intimate portraits redefined Pahari painting
  • Nihal Chand (1710-1782) — Kishangarh court painter of the idealized heroine Bani Thani
  • Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) — Art historian who named the field in his 1916 monograph Rajput Painting

Example works

  • Dancing Villagers — Pandit Seu (c. 1730)
  • Mewar Ramayana — Sahibdin (1649-1653)
  • Bani Thani — Nihal Chand (c. 1750)

Sources

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