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A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur

Title: A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur
Author List: Debra Diamond (ed.), Dipti Khera (ed.), with contributions by Molly Emma Aitken, Saloni Ghuwalewala, S. Girikumar, Catherine Glynn, John Stratton Hawley, Shikha Jain, Robin Owen Joyce, Shailka Mishra, Anuja Mukherjee, Bhasha Shah, Emma Natalya Stein, Cynthia Talbot, P. M. Vasundhara, Caroline Widmer, Richard David Williams
Publisher: Hirmer Publishers; National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution
Publication Date: February 19, 2023
Publication Type: book
Format: print (hardcover)
Pages: 400
Illustrations: 270
ISBN: 9783777439440
Collection Area(s): South Asian and Himalayan Art
A Splendid Land book cover. A white castle on a tree dotted hill sits against a sky of swirling blue, red, and gold clouds. The hill is dotted with people walking. In the foreground is a gray body of water with people on a brown boat.
Description:

A lavishly illustrated volume that explores the immersive aesthetics and emotional resonance of paintings from the lake city of Udaipur.

Around 1700, artists in Udaipur began creating large, immersive paintings to convey the mood of the city’s palaces, lakes, and mountains. A Splendid Land explores how painters depicted places, mapped terrains, and triggered memories to foster political and personal attachments to land through dazzling paintings that were made over a two-century period spanning from Mughal to colonial India—paintings which have never before been published or exhibited in the United States. The book opens up new interpretative possibilities by displacing the figure of the king to examine social networks, cultural landscapes, pleasure, and politics; by drawing upon previously untranslated sources; and by engaging with the latest scholarship on the history of the senses.

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Related Exhibition

  • a white and gold palace against a vivid sky with swirling multicolor clouds

    A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur

    Around 1700, artists in Udaipur began creating immersive paintings that express the moods (bhava) of the city’s palaces, lakes, and mountains. These large works and their emphasis on lived experience constituted a new direction in Indian painting. With dazzling paintings on paper and cloth—many on public view for the first time—the exhibition reveals the environmental, political, and emotional contexts in which the new genre emerged.

    View Exhibition

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