A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur

Around the year 1700, artists in Udaipur (a court in northwest India) began creating immersive paintings that expressed the mood (bhava) of the city’s palaces, lakes, and mountains. These ambitious works, with their emphasis on lived experience, marked a new direction in Indian painting.

With vibrant paintings on paper and cloth—many displayed to the public for the first time—the exhibition reveals the environmental, political, and emotional contexts in which this new genre emerged. A Splendid Land explores the innovative visual strategies artists developed to convey feeling, depict place, and honor water as a vital resource.

The exhibition is organized as a journey that begins in the center of Udaipur and moves outward: first to the lakes and lakeside palaces, then into the city, out to the surrounding countryside, and finally into the cosmos. A side trip immerses visitors in the emotions surrounding the monsoon, the annual rains essential to the prosperity of Mewar. Throughout, a soundscape by renowned filmmaker Amit Dutta invites audiences to feel—not just see—the moods of these extraordinary places and paintings.

A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur was on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the summer of 2023.