Shiva and Dayal

Shiva and Dayal are known exclusively from a single attribution on a monumental painting dated 1744 and now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Working in the Mewar palace atelier at Udaipur, they produced Maharana Jagat Singh Hawks for Cranes, a sweeping panorama executed in opaque watercolor, ink, and gold on paper that measures roughly twenty-seven by twenty-nine inches. The image portrays Maharana Jagat Singh II, who ruled Mewar from 1734 to 1751, engaged in a royal hawking expedition across a fantastically segmented landscape.

Consecutive vignettes piece together the hunt like a jigsaw puzzle, each compartment showing episodes of the party's progress amid hillocks, streams, and fields. An enormous sunburst fills the upper register, its rays bearing the golden insignia Rajput princes displayed on their standards. The plunging aerial perspective, which suggests the dramatic views from Rajput fortifications, was an innovation of the Mewar school and may also indicate awareness of European cartography.

Scholars note that the large scale and complexity are typical of mid-eighteenth-century Udaipur production, where it was common for multiple artists to share labor on a single picture, presumably dividing tasks such as composition, landscape, architecture, and figures according to individual skill. Because no further works bear their names and no documents record their lives, Shiva and Dayal remain obscure figures, their entire known legacy resting on this one court commission.