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Artwork Details
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Title:The Gundalao Lake
Artist:Attributed to Nihal Chand (fl. 1725-82)
Date:ca. 1740
Medium:Opaque watercolor, gold and silver on paper
Dimensions:Page: H. 10 1/16 in. (25.6 cm) W. 13 3/4 in. (34.9 cm) Painting: H. 9 7/16 in. (22.9 cm) W. 11 7/16 in. (28.6 cm)
Classification:Codices
Credit Line:Promised Gift from the Kronos Collections, 2015
Of all the former kingdoms of Rajasthan, each ruled by a hereditary Hindu raja (king) on behalf of the Mughals and later the British, KIshangarh is the smallest a mere 858 square miles, about the size of Martha’s Vineyard. The kingdom, located in the center of Rajasthan, consisted of two narrow strips of land: a hilly northern tract and a flat southern tract, with the capital city (also called Kishangarh) and the Gundalao Lake in the northern area. Yet if the kingdom was insignificant in size, it was a major power in terms of painting it was the home of several of India’s finest painters, and the venue of a very influential school of court painting. The kingdom, its modest territory a gift of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 15561605), was first established in the early seventeenth century by Maharaja Kishan Singh (r. 160515), an offspring of the Jodhpur royal family. From the days of Maharaja Kishan Singh, the state was ruled by a lineage of kings who remained close to the Mughal imperial family. (This connection is visible in the court painting they sponsored, which is really a Mughal variant of the Rajasthani idiom.) The founder was the maternal uncle of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (r. l62758) and the brotherinlaw of the Mughal emperor Jahangir (r. l60527) A later ruler, Maharaja Rup Singh (r. 164358), was the brotherinlaw of the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah (r. 170712) and the grandfather of the Mughal emperor Farrukhsiyar (r. 1712l9). This picture can be attributed to the Delhitrained artist Nihal Chand (fl. ca. 172582), the greatest of the Kishangarh painters. Nihal Chand specialized in moody, deeply receding 34. SK.030 DP336303.TIF landscapes as well as depictions of episodes in the love affair of Radha and Krishna, with the two figures positioned beneath, as here, spectacularly romantic sunset skies. The present picture is composed of alternating water and hills rising to a fiery sunset, in the characteristic Nihal Chand manner. The water palace in the center is probably the Mokham Vilas, a garden and pleasure haunt that was only accessible by boat when the Gundalao Lake was filled with water during the rainy months. The palace in the background is probably the Phool Mahal (Flower Palace) which was situated on one shore of the Gundalao lake. The Phool Mahal was the principal residence of the Kishangarh ruling family. The tiny figures in the foreground depict one episode in the torrid love affair of the divine couple. Krishna, the tiny blue figure with long flowing tresses, is swimming towards Radha, who waits for him, resting on a carpet on the Gundalao shore. These tiny figures may have been added later, perhaps in the nineteenth century, to make a viable composition, when the original page was cut in half, as I suspect it was. (The missing lower half might have become damaged.) If this supposition is correct, then what one sees today is the upper half, i.e. the landscape background, of an originally much larger painting. The original painting would have looked a bit like Nihal Chand’s famous Boat of Love, now in the National Museum, New Delhi. (1) In the Kronos picture, there would have been much larger figures in the missing middle ground and foreground, with Krishna and Radha appearing there once again as the central characters. When reunited the two halves, the extant Kronos picture and its missing lower half, would have made a very ambitious composition perhaps one of Nihal Chand’s greatest masterpieces. (1) Eric Dickinson and Karl Khandalavala, Kishangarh Painting (New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1959), pl. IX .
McInerney 1977
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Divine Pleasures: Painting from India's Rajput Courts—The Kronos Collections," June 13–September 11, 2016.
The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world.
