B.N Goswamy  In-Stock  - Used Like New Copy

Aryan Books International

Hardcover 1999

Rare/Limited Edition Product

This work forms one of the most valuable contributions made till date to the area of Punjab studies. For Painters at the Sikh Court is more than simply a work about painting and patronage: enhancing & deepening the understanding of the royal courts. The material presented in it enhances and deepens our very understanding of how things worked at the Sikh courts, both at the royal and the sub-royal levels.

The twenty documents that constitute the body of this study - a chance find - come from one single family of painters in the Pahari area, members of which took up service at Lahore after patronage dried up in their own native areas. But taken together, they form a formidable body of hard information about painters, their migrations, their relationships with new patrons, the terms on which they were engaged,among other things. Studies of paintings at the Sikh courts would be remarkably thin without the substance that these documents contain.

The significance of this study goes,however,well beyond the area of the Punjab, for one knows that nothing comparable to this material is available from any other period of Indian painting, or from any other region.