Pahari Masters
Court Painters of Northern India
Paper Type: Art Paper (Matt) | Size: 292 x 229mm
All colour; 306 photographs
ISBN-10: 8189738461 | ISBN-13: 978-81-89738-46-4
2500 | 85 | 45
Pahari painting – ‘Painting from the Hills’, often subsumed under the broad head, Rajput Painting – has long been acknowledged as one of the great achievements of India in the realm of art. For too long, however, the Pahari painter, the maker of these images, has continued to be seen as belonging to an indeterminate, anonymous group of craftsmen who simply plied predetermined brushes. The present
work is aimed at challenging that notion, for it presents the painter as a thinking man, faced with, and capable of, exercising choices. It was time that the ‘long winter of neglect’ in which he had been left by history came to an end.
The authors draw attention here to fourteen Pahari Masters, whose work spans a period of three hundred years. The paintings come from as many as twenty different museums and private collections, the effort being to select such works as illumine each master’s range as also the processes of thought from which his art is likely to have sprung. Carefully, the essay on each master presents the evidence available on him, the known extent of his work, and an analysis of his style.
Pahari Masters is a pioneering work of great significance. When first published in German, it was widely acclaimed as ‘a great work’, and has come since to occupy the status of a classic, laying down the lines along which the future of studies in Indian painting is likely to proceed
B. N. Goswamy
Author
B.N. Goswamy, a distinguished art historian is Professor Emeritus of Art
History at Panjab University, Chandigarh. His work covers a wide range of
subjects, and is regarded, especially in the area of Indian painting, as having
influenced most thinking. He has been the recipient of many honours, including
the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship, the Rietberg Award for Outstanding Research in
Art History, the JDR III Fellowship, the Mellon Senior Fellowship and, from the
President of India, Padma Shri (1998) and Padma Bhushan (2008). Apart from
Panjab University, Professor Goswamy has taught, as Visiting Professor, in
major universities across the world, and has been responsible for significant
exhibitions of Indian art at international venues. He is the author of
over twenty-five books on Indian art and culture, including Pahari Painting: The Family as the Basis of Style (1968); Painters at the Sikh Court: A Study Based on
Twenty Documents (1975); A
Place Apart: Paintings from Kutch (1983); The
Essence of Indian Art (1986); Wonders
of a Golden Age: Painting at the Courts of the Great Mughals (1987); Pahari Masters: Court Painters of Northern India (with
E. Fischer, 1992); Indian
Costumes in the Calico Museum of Textiles (1993); Nainsukh
of Guler: A great Indian Painter from a small Hill State (1997); Domains of Wonder: Selected Masterworks of
Indian Painting (with C. Smith, 2005); and,
more recently, The
Spirit of Indian Painting: Close Encounters with 100 Great Works (2014,
2016) and Pahari
Paintings: The Horst Metzger Collection in the Museum Rietberg (with
E. Fischer, 2018).
Eberhard Fischer
Author
Dr Eberhard Fischer is an art historian and cultural anthropologist. Until
recently he was senior director of the Museum Rietberg in Zurich. Since 1965,
when he first went to India for a teaching assignment at the National Institute
of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, he has worked continuously in India – from
Gujarat to Orissa, from Himachal Pradesh to Kerala. He collaborated with
distinguished Indian scholars and artists including Haku Shah, Prof. Jyotindra
Jain, Dr Dinanath Pathy, Prof. B. N. Goswamy, Balan Nambiar and Vijay Sharma on
joint exhibitions as well as publication projects. He received the Padma Shri
in 2012.