Indian Miniature

Indian Miniature is an art movement of the 1550–1900 period. The gallery holds 211 works in this movement, including works by Bhadrabahu, Pradyumnasuri and Devachandra. Browse Indian Miniature paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Indian miniature painting names not a single style but a continuous tradition of small, intensely detailed pictures made on the subcontinent to be held in the hand, bound into albums (muraqqa), or set among the pages of a manuscript. Its deepest roots lie in illustrated religious books: the palm-leaf manuscripts of the Buddhist Pala kingdoms of eastern India around the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the Jain manuscripts of western India, above all the Kalpasutra copied and painted in Gujarat. By the fifteenth century these Jain pages had abandoned palm leaf for paper and grown opulent, with figures set against grounds of lapis-lazuli blue and lavish gold leaf.

The tradition was transformed in the sixteenth century under the Mughal emperors. Akbar's vast project to illustrate the Hamzanama—roughly 1,400 large paintings produced over some fifteen years by a workshop of around a hundred artists led by the Persian masters Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad—fused Persian refinement with Indian color and observation, defining the early Mughal school. Painters such as Basawan and Daswanth brought a new naturalism to crowded, ordered compositions; under Jahangir, an emperor obsessed with precise observation, Ustad Mansur produced exacting studies of birds, beasts and flowers, including a famous likeness of the dodo.

Mughal aesthetics radiated outward into the Hindu courts. The Rajput, or Rajasthani, schools of Mewar, Marwar and Kishangarh favored bold, flat color and devotional and heroic themes: Sahibdin painted Ramayana and Bhagavata Purana series at Mewar, while at Kishangarh, Nihal Chand created the idealized, lotus-eyed images of Radha and Krishna—modeled on the courtesan-poet Bani Thani—often called the finest of all Rajasthani miniatures. In the Himalayan foothills the Pahari schools of Basohli, Guler and Kangra cultivated a softer, lyrical manner, its masters Manaku and Nainsukh distilling the love of Radha and Krishna into delicate landscapes.

Technically the works share much: opaque watercolor and ground mineral and vegetable pigments, gold and silver, applied to burnished wasli paper with brushes of a few fine hairs, yielding flat patterning, jewel-like surfaces and minute detail. Court patronage declined under British rule, but the tradition was deliberately revived in the early twentieth century by Abanindranath Tagore and the Bengal School, who looked back to Mughal and Rajput models to forge a modern, distinctly Indian art.