Lady Seated with a Confidante in a Pavilion as a Storm Approaches

Kangra was a princely state in the so-called Pahari region in the Himalayan foothills of northern India. The Pahari region was home to a number of closely related painting schools in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These painting schools were all descended from a courtly painting tradition that was brought to India from Iran by the Mughals in the early sixteenth century. As Mughal power weakened in the late seventeenth century, court painters sought patronage in some of the princely Rajput courts that coexisted with the Mughals, and many new regional styles were born.

Kangra painters were known for their use of highly refined mineral colors that often gave their images an almost jewellike quality. They specialized in romantic and erotic themes and were highly adept at depicting nocturnal and other atmospheric scenes. This image of a richly dressed woman sitting with a companion on a palace terrace as dark storm clouds loom overhead is an excellent example of Kangra painting. The subject is not conclusively identified, but it may depict an episode from Jayadeva Goswami's epic twelfth-century poem Gita Govinda, in which the former cow-maid Radha and her servant watch an approaching storm and imagine that it is the arrival of her lover, Krishna. The love story of Krishna and Radha was a favorite subject for Kangra artists and appears many times in both single-leaf paintings and in larger series of paintings that were bound together as albums and viewed as visual narratives by the Kangra aristocracy.

The AMAM has a small but good collection of Indian miniature paintings that represent a range of different subjects and regional styles. The collection also includes a number of preparatory drawings that are especially useful for teaching students about the creative processes behind these images.