Illustration from the Mahabharata

Around 1790, in the small Himalayan kingdom of Kangra in northern India, the court workshop was working its way through the Mahabharata, the enormous Sanskrit epic of a war between two branches of one royal family. A story that long was illustrated the way a book is, one episode to a page, and this tempera sheet is a single leaf from such a series. It is painted in the Kangra manner the hills are famous for, fine and lyrical, and it carries the crowded compositions the workshop of the painter Purkhu favoured, many small figures filling a courtly setting. The colour is tempera laid on paper in thin, glowing washes. Sheets like this were meant to be held and passed from hand to hand, looked at closely one at a time, not hung on a wall.