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How is a Rajasthani miniature painted?
On wasli — several sheets of handmade paper pasted and burnished into a hard surface — using ground mineral pigment bound in gum arabic and brushes made from a few squirrel hairs. The drawing is set down first, the flat colours next, then modelling in dozens of translucent layers, with the sheet burnished from the reverse between stages. Gold is applied last and polished with an agate.
Miniature is a misleading word: these are not scaled-down paintings but a distinct technique whose whole logic is close looking. A face is built in layers thin enough to see through, and the burnishing between layers is what gives the surface its particular hardness. The paintings in the paintings and manuscripts gallery are shown at a distance at which that is visible.
In this entry
- Wasli. Making the support, and why it is not ordinary paper.
- Brushes. Squirrel hair, and what a three-hair brush can do.
- Pigment. The mineral palette, its chemistry, and dating by it.
- The sequence. Drawing, flat colour, modelling, burnishing, gold.
- Schools. Amber and Jaipur, and how they differ from Mewar, Kishangarh and Bundi.
- The paintings here. The Amber royal portraits, the Ragamala folio, the Shamsa folio, and the Lakshmi with Basra pearls.
- Looking at one. What to check, and in what order.
The gold is the last thing that happens
Gold is laid at the end because it cannot be painted over and because burnishing it — with a smooth agate, against a hard support — will destroy any soft passage next to it. In the best work the burnished gold is not uniform: the painter varies the pressure so that a jewel catches differently from a border. That is worth checking against the actual jewellery, two galleries away, in jewellery, where the same ornaments are the things being depicted.