Around 1700, artists in Udaipur (a court in northwest India) began creating immersive paintings that express the moods (bhava) of the city’s palaces, lakes, and mountains. These large works and their emphasis on lived experience constituted a new direction in Indian painting. With dazzling paintings on paper and cloth-many on public view for the first time-the exhibition A Splendid Land reveals the environmental, political, and emotional contexts in which the new genre emerged. It explored the unique visual strategies that artists developed to communicate emotions, depict places, and celebrate water resources.
The exhibition was organized as a journey that begins at Udaipur’s centre and continues outward: first its lakes and lake palaces, then to the city, onward to the surrounding countryside, and finally to the cosmos. A side trip immerses visitors in the emotions surrounding the monsoon, the annual rains so crucial to Mewar’s prosperity. Throughout, a soundscape by the renowned filmmaker Amit Dutta invites audiences to fully sense-and not just see-the moods of these extraordinary places and paintings.