Untitled

Unknown

ca. 1705–8 · Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper · Asian Art

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.

Artist

Unknown

Date

ca. 1705–8

Medium

Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper

Culture

India (Rajasthan, Mewar)

Department

Asian Art

Credit line

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carl Bimel Jr., 1996