The Topography of Emotion: Eighteenth-Century Landscape Paintings of Udaipur, Rajasthan

India’s abundant literary and poetic forms describe sacred rivers and mountains, praise cities and palaces, and parse the moods evoked by diverse terrains. In contrast, India’s painters rarely depicted landscapes. Yet between 1700 and 1900, court artists in Udaipur, a Hindu court in northwest India, produced hundreds of paintings that represent the kingdom’s riverine plains, forested hillsides, and man-made lakes. They are typically interpreted as royal portraits. In this talk, curator Debra Diamond decenters the king to focus on the cultural and ecological contexts of a significant but little-known painting in the Freer collection. She demonstrates how artists conjured local geographies and environmental interventions to evoke moods and strengthen social bonds. The talk is a sneak peek at research that Dr. Diamond is preparing for the museum’s 2022–23 exhibition A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, which she will co-curate with Dr. Dipti Khera, associate professor of art history at New York Univers