Raja Sujan Singh of Bikaner smoking a hookah

Raja Sujan Singh of Bikaner (born 1690, reigned 1700 -- 1735) enjoys a hookah from a terrace that overlooks a flowering garden and a misty landscape. The painterly sky, with swathes of gold wash near the trees and dilute washes in the sky, skillfully evokes hazy light. The painting's palette, its atmospheric landscape, and the distant white city on the hill point to the role that Deccani painting played in transforming Bikaner painting from a brightly-colored provincial idiom to a highly refined aesthetic in the late seventeenth century. 

The painting's pastel tones of lavender, pink, and salmon, its soft greens and diffused mauves, and the distant white city on the hill can be most directly traced to painting from the Deccani court of Bijapur.[1]  Although Bikaner rulers had long ties to the Deccan, having served there as Mughal generals from the 1570s, Sujan Singh's father, Maharaja Anup Singh (r. 1674-98), became the governor of Bijapur following Emperor Aurangzeb's conquest of the kingdom.  That close contact with Bijapur becomes visible in the folios of a magnificent Bhagavata Purana that Anup Singh commissioned.[2] The Sackler's superb folio from Anup Singh's Bhagavata Purana (c.1690-1700, S2018.1.46) demonstrates the synthesis of styles achieved by Bikaner paintings at the end of the seventeenth century, as well as the emotional depths that they instilled in landscapes bathed in golden light. Sujan Singh's portrait extends the synthesis of his father's sacred narrative into the genre of royal portraiture.