Painting Gallery

at Zenana Mahal, The City Palace Museum, Udaipur

The Painting Collection at The City Palace Museum forms a significant part of the Pictorial Archives of the Maharana's of Mewar at Udaipur. Best known for the wonderful vitality of their colours, forms and subjects, these paintings at Udaipur are the nucleus of a genre known across the world as the Mewar school. Collected and produced under the patronage of successive Maharana's of Mewar , this group of paintings include spectacularly large and small paintings depicting myriad subjects and themes. These paintings while being typical to the style developed and refined in Mewar also present an important synthesis of painting traditions from Rajasthan and beyond. The collection at the City Palace includes oils and other paintings in the 'European' style, both by Indian and Western artists. The survey and assessment of the painting collections began in December 2009, as the first phase of cataloguing photographs in the collection was completed. The survey revealed a number of important paintings, including some early examples that give us the chance to reassess the story of the Mewar School of painting. Close links - sometimes almost symbiotic also exist between the painting and photographic traditions of Mewar , and the opportunity to study these related practices in sequence is also significant.

It is very important to the Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation that the Museum conserves and preserves these works as both cultural and academic resources. As documents of the past, these paintings provide us new insight into our long and complex history, as living heritage, and hopefully, enable us to learn valuable lessons from it.