What Centuries-Old Indian Court Paintings Tell Us About Climate Change
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Loading... - Yash Delal
- 25 Apr 2023
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In “Monsoon Mood,” the latest episode of the Smithsonian podcast Sidedoor, host Lizzie Peabody digs into a 300-year-old artistic revolution—one that has surprising new relevance in the 21st century as we look for ways to forestall catastrophic climate change.
Peabody joins with co-curators Debra Diamond and Dipti Khera to discuss the new exhibition “A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur,” which opened at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art last November. The show brings together a series of paintings on paper and cloth created in the late 17th through late 19th centuries in the hot and dry Indian region of Udaipur—an area that relied on the heavy rainfall of the summer monsoon season for its survival through the remainder of the year. The way these paintings use landscapes, and specifically depictions of storms and bodies of water, to convey mood and emotion was radical when they were made.
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In traditional Indian art, there’s a word to describe that visceral mood or emotion the work is meant to provoke within its audience: bhava.
Up until the 1690s, paintings of people in this region were made to flatter and venerate royalty. But when Maharana Amar Singh II became king of Udaipur around 1700, he had the wild idea that scenes, events, people and animals from his kingdom should be celebrated in art.
Prior to his reign, court painters would typically train their brushes a single subject—a peacock, for instance, or a cloud—as a symbolic reflection of some flattering idea about the ruler or the kingdom. But under this new king, court artists began to document scenes from life, albeit idealized ones. Their paintings also became much, much larger—as much as seven feet across. And scribes would rely on these semi-narrative paintings as sources for their written histories. Read More…
