topics: |  art | india | medieval |

It is tragedy that this enormous treasure trove of beautiful art was taken from India - either "purchased" in rather unequal conditions or simply looted, and they now grace the shelves of the British Museum, and also other private museums. .

This text outlines a history of the Rajput school of painting, starting with the earlier paintings (c. 1500s), often illustrations to texts such as the Bhagavata Purana to the work from the three succeeding centuries.

Rajput painting developed under the patronage of the royalty and nobility of the many courts of Rajasthan, central India and the Punjab / Himachal hill states, an area covering a large part of North-western India from the foothills of the western Himalayas to the central region of the Gangetic plain.

The art has its antecedents in the art of the mughal court, often miniatures, starting with Akbar and continuing with Jahangir, and marks a diffusion from the center into the peripheries. going back even earlier, the antecedents lie in the traditions of islamic art in the ottoman empire, since many of the artists arrived in delhi after the fall of the ottoman empire (e.g. Orhan Pamuk's My name is Red) ]

The origins of the Rajputs, who claim descent from the gods and heroes of India's ancient epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are shrouded in legend and myth. Their recorded history begins around the seventh century AD and is extolled by their courtly bards in long poems of ancestry and lineage, heroic and military exploits recounted through the ages. Their social structure was that of the clan: chieftains holding jagir, or fiefs, pledged loyalty to the clan ruler who in turn supported his chieftains.

These early illustrations were either iconic in character, similar to those in Jain manuscripts that depicted incidents in the lives of their jinas (religious leaders) beside descriptive text, or narrative, relating to legends surrounding the gods. Early Rajput manuscript painting on paper coincided with later Jain manuscript illustrations and Sultanate painting patronized by the Delhi Sultans in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries. Fig. 1, a folio from the tenth book of an early Bhagavata Purana Legends of the deity Krishna) dating to approximately the second quarter of the sixteenth century, comprises horizontal registers primary background colours in which wide-eyed and curvaceous figures play out their part in the legends...

 
Three krishNas in union with three gopis