Artists of Nathadwara The Practice of Painting in Rajasthan

In this beautifully illustrated study, Tryna Lyons combines ethnographic and art historical methods to examine the work and careers of artists in Nathadwara, Rajasthan, India. The religious pilgrimage center of Nathadwara is home to a large community of traditional artists, who retain sketchbooks and other materials handed down in their families for generations. The old sketchbooks, still used to teach younger generations and to provide established artists with ideas, reveal the connection between contemporary practice and the historical antecedents of the Nathadwara school of painting. Lyons's innovative approach focuses on analysis of the sketchbooks of five artists active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reproduced here in detail alongside full-color reproductions of their work and related images. The sketchbooks reveal personal style and innovation, demonstrating the array of choices open to artists in a time of cultural ferment and excitement. A section on women artists documents the careers of successful female exponents of the Nathadwara style. Appendixes include a glossary and a collection of artists' genealogies, some stretching back 17 generations, recording significant information on artistic activities, commissions, and patronage. The Artists of Nathadwara should make us question Orientalist assumptions about tradition and the anonymity of South Asian artisans.

"The Artists of Nathadwara is a rich and beautifully rendered consideration of the work and lives of artists inhabiting the pilgrimage center of Nathadwara (Rajasthan, India) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries." --Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, Colorado State University, AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 110.2 June 2008

"... This text provides myriad rewards for careful readers willing to accompany Lyons on her sometimes painstaking, but always faithful, illuminating, and deeply evocative journey into a period and place of unexpected creativity." --American Anthropologist, June 2008 Indiana University Press

"Though this book is a delight to look through, and the text pleasantly light and welcoming to both scholar and general reader, there are important issues working under the surface of The Artists of Nathadwara: the face-off between folk art and traditional high culture; the presence in the artists' self-image of an imposed European aesthetic; artistic integrity and individualism within a system of religious patronage. Lyons does not so much evade these issues as nod gracefully to acknowledge them, then return to her exposition of the artists and the objects they produced." --Diane Johnson, Western Washington University, JRNL AMERICAN ORIENTAL SOCIETY ANE, Oct.-Dec. 2007

"Delving into hard-to-find, hard-to-access, and hard-to-read records... Lyons has brought an enormous amount of new material to light from previously unknown sketchbooks, to her findings on women artists, to her extraordinary tracings of painter family history. She has made these artists too present to ignore, and many of our assumptions will have to make way to accommodate them." --caa.reviews

"Tryna Lyons's The Artists of Nathadwara vividly renders a community of traditional painters. It brings to life a profession that the field of South Asian art studies has tended to sidestep in its focus on objects... By interviewing living artists from Nathadwara and studying late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Nathadwara painters whose notebooks exist and whose descendents remember them, Lyons finally turns the field of Indian painting studies toward the artists' perspectives, with the result that we begin to see the painter's profession in a very different light." --caa.reviews

"Scholarly and well illustrated.... Recommended." --Library Journal Indiana University Press Indiana University Press

"Indepedent scholar Lyons reconstructed more than 15 years of the history of artisan families who practiced in the pilgrimage town of Nathadwara since the 19th century.... The author's style is informal and easy to read.... A unique book for students of Indian studies. Recommended." --Choice

"I thoroughly recommend this beautifully produced book to anyone interested in the development and practise of Indian painting as well as the lives of the painters." --Anne-Marie Gaston, Carleton University, Ethnologies, Volume 29, Number 1-2, 2007

This beautifully illustrated catalogue examines the historic and contemporary art and culture of the Hindu Pushti Marg sect and the tradition of temple paintings known as pichhvais.

The Pushtimarg, a Hindu sect established in India in the fifteenth century, possesses a unique cultureandmdash;reaching back centuries and still vital todayandmdash;in which art and devotion are deeply intertwined. This important volume, illustrated with more than one hundred vivid images, offers a new, in-depth look at the Pushtimarg and its rich aesthetic traditions, which are largely unknown outside of South Asia.

and#160;

Original essays by eminent scholars of Indian art focus on the style of worship, patterns of patronage, and artistic heritage that generated pichvais, large paintings on cloth designed to hang in temples, as well as other paintings for the Pushtimarg. In this expansive study, the authors deftly examine how pichvais were and still are used in the seasonal and daily veneration of Shrinathji, an aspect of Krishna as a child who is the chief deity of the temple town of Nathdwara in Rajasthan. Gates of the Lord introduces readers not only to the visual world of the Pushtimarg, but also to the spirit of Nathdwara.

Madhuvanti Ghose is the Alsdorf Associate Curator of Indian, Southeast Asian, Himalayan, and Islamic Art at the Art Institute of Chicago.and#160;

I. Introduction: At Home with Shri Nathji

II. Home and the World: Mural Paintings by Nathadwara Artists

III. "By Omkarlal and Friends": The Cooperative Workshop in Turn-of-the-Century Nathadwara

IV. Champalal's Sketchbook: A Glimpse of the Temple in Old Bombay

V. Narayan and His Descendants: Family as Framework for the Evolution of Style

VI. Ghasiram's Sketchbooks: An Artist's Eye to the Future

VII. England-Returned Master Kundanlal

VIII. The Women Artists of Nathadwara

IX. Family Matters

X. Conclusion

Appendices 1-13

List of words with diacritical marks

Glossary

Index

Bibliography