Pahari Painting

Pahari painting is the umbrella term for a school of Indian miniature painting produced in the lower Himalayan hill kingdoms of North India, principally Basohli, Guler, Kangra, Chamba, Mankot, Nurpur, Mandi and Garhwal, from the early seventeenth to the mid nineteenth century. Its central subject is the eternal love of the Hindu deities Radha and Krishna, rendered across the school's various workshops with a lyricism and softness of modeling that distinguishes its later, more refined phases from the bolder, more angular idiom of the earlier Basohli manner. The painter Nainsukh, active in the mid eighteenth century, and his family workshop across two further generations, are among its most celebrated masters, and Kangra in particular became closely associated with the tradition's most refined later phase.