Rajput painting

Rajput painting is an art movement of the 1600–1900 period. The gallery holds 153 works in this movement, including works by Sahibdin, Ruknuddin and Nihâl Chand. Browse Rajput painting paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Rajput painting is a tradition of Indian miniature painting that flourished in the royal courts of Rajputana—present-day Rajasthan and adjoining regions—from roughly the late sixteenth century into the nineteenth. The term was coined by the scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy in 1916 to distinguish the art patronized by the Hindu Rajput princes from the imperial Mughal school. The style took root first in Mewar, growing out of earlier western Indian manuscript traditions, especially the bold, angular Chaurapanchasika idiom, before spreading to a constellation of princely ateliers including Bundi, Kota, Bikaner, Marwar (Jodhpur), Kishangarh, Jaipur, Malwa, and Sirohi.

Though each court cultivated its own manner, Rajput painting shares a recognizable visual language: flat planes of brilliant, mineral-derived colour, firm rhythmic outlines, stylized faces shown in profile, and ornamental backgrounds of floral motifs, architectural frames, and lavish gold and silver leaf. Pigments were ground from minerals and metals and burnished to a jewel-like finish. Where Mughal art prized naturalism and individual portraiture, Rajput painters favoured emotional intensity, symbolic colour, and decorative pattern. Contact with the Mughal workshops during the seventeenth century nonetheless refined Rajput drawing, modelling, and spatial depth without dissolving its devotional character. Themes were overwhelmingly Hindu—episodes from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Bhagavata Purana, the loves of Krishna and Radha, and the musical-mode "Ragamala" and "Rasikapriya" cycles.

Several named masters anchor the canon. Sahibdin, a Muslim artist wholly fluent in Hindu epic, dominated Mewar in the first half of the seventeenth century, producing a celebrated Ragamala in 1628 for Maharana Jagat Singh I and an ambitious illustrated Ramayana (the Yuddha Kanda, 1652). At Bikaner, Ruknuddin (active c. 1666–97) directed the royal atelier under Maharaja Anup Singh, fusing Mughal elegance with a Deccani-tinged palette. At Kishangarh, Nihal Chand (1710–1782), chief painter to Savant Singh, created the ethereal images of Bani Thani—the elongated, lotus-eyed beauty often called the "Mona Lisa of India" and widely held to be the finest of all Rajasthani miniatures.

Rajput painting is conventionally divided into the Rajasthani schools of the plains and the Pahari schools of the lower Himalayas (Basohli, Guler, Kangra). Sharing devotional subjects but distinguished by lyrical landscape, the Pahari styles form its closest sibling tradition. Together they constitute one of the great achievements of Indian art, sustaining indigenous Hindu pictorial culture alongside, and in productive tension with, the Mughal painting from which they borrowed and against which they defined themselves.