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.
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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