A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c15.4

c15.4

The only extant wall-paintings on a Hindu building of considerable age in Northern India are the decorations, dating from either the seventeenth or eighteenth century, on the old palace at Bikanīr in Rājputāna. The designs, representing a heavy thunderstorm with lightning playing through the clouds, and storks circling below, are said to be not only curious but beautiful. The work is described as displaying conspicuously Chinese feeling, a fact easily accounted for when we remember the long-continued influence of Chinese art on Persian painting and the Indo-Persian school, which will be discussed when the productions of that school come under consideration. Unfortunately, reproductions of the Bikanīr paintings are not available. The small illustration of the flower-like cloud forms in Sir George Watt's book is too trifling to be of use. The same conventional mode of depicting clouds is said to be found on the hide shields of Tonk and to recur over and over again on objects of various kinds throughout Rājputāna and Central India.¹