Rajput

Scope note: Painting style of India associated with the Hindu Rajput princes, who came to power after the collapse of the Gupta empire. Their courts were often Hindu centers of learning and they were patrons of poets, scholars and artists. Rajput painting was a huge movement with markedly Indian characteristics, in a sense contrasting with the art of the Muslim Mughals who were their opponents. Nevertheless, as the Rajput rulers came to be obedient to the Mughal rulers in order to keep their territories, Mughal artistic developments affected traditional manuscript illumination of the Rajput courts in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Mughals were particularly important to the introduction and spread of portrait painting in Rajput artistic centers. In contrast to Mughal painting which was realistic, Rajput painting is, like the Hindi literature it is closely tied to, symbolic and suffused with poetic metaphor. Even the colors used often had specific meaning; the coloration is typically flat and unblended in a manner suggesting stained glass. The known examples from the late sixteenth to the nineteenth century fall into two main groups, Rajasthani and Pahari.

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