Maharana Amar Singh II, Prince Sangram Singh and Courtiers Watch a Performance

India (Rajasthan, Mewar)

Not on view

This scene of actors and acrobats performing for the maharana exemplifies the changes that were taking place in painting during Amar Singh II's reign. Like his seventeenth-century predecessors, the artist has depicted several moments in time simultaneously; however, he is no longer strictly dividing the moments from one another. Instead, he has collapsed time, picturing different episodes side by side while making no attempt to clarify the sequence in which they occurred. The artist merely hints at temporal disjunctions through shifts in scale, showing the ruler and his nobles in the upper left to be larger than the actors below. Such narrative techniques became integral to the pictorial style of the eighteenth century.

Maharana Amar Singh II, Prince Sangram Singh and Courtiers Watch a Performance, Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper, India (Rajasthan, Mewar)

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