Pahari Miniature Painting
The hill courts of the Western Himalaya and their art Overview Imagine a painting no larger than a hardcover book – perhaps eight inches by twelve – on a sheet of hand-burnished paper so smooth it feels like skin. The surface gleams faintly because the paper was prepared with a wash of white lead, then rubbed with a polished agate stone until it became as dense and luminous as an eggshell. On this surface, using brushes made from a few hairs of a squirrel’s tail, an artist has laid down colour so saturated and so flat that it seems to exist not on the paper but inside it: a red so intense it appears to vibrate, a yellow that holds the warmth of afternoon sunlight, a blue-black sky that seems to pull you in. The figures are small, precise, drawn with a line as fine as a hair and as confident as a calligrapher’s stroke. A woman stands on a terrace. Lightning flashes behind stylised mountains. Trees are rendered as patterns of leaf and branch so rhythmic they become almost textile. A border of ruled lines – red, then yellow, then black – frames the image like a window. ...