कला का इतिहास — भारतीय और विश्व
Ancient India — from rock shelters to Ajanta
| Period | Landmark | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| prehistoric | Bhimbetka rock shelters, Madhya Pradesh | hunting and dancing scenes in red and white; a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2003 |
| Indus (Harappan) | Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro | a small bronze, cast by the lost-wax method |
| Priest-King | a bust in steatite with a trefoil-patterned shawl | |
| Pashupati seal | a seated figure surrounded by animals | |
| Mauryan | Lion Capital, Sarnath | four lions back to back; India's national emblem |
| Didarganj Yakshi | a life-size woman holding a fly-whisk, found at Didarganj, Patna, in 1917, with the glassy Mauryan polish; now in the Bihar Museum | |
| Gupta and after | Ajanta caves, Maharashtra | Buddhist murals from about the 2nd century BCE to the 5th century CE — the Bodhisattva Padmapani of Cave 1 |
| Ellora | the Kailasa temple (Cave 16), carved downward from a single rock under the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I in the 8th century |
The Mauryan polish — a mirror-like shine on sandstone, seen on Ashoka's pillars and the Didarganj Yakshi, which no later period matched.
The trap: the Didarganj Yakshi is from Patna, and is a Mauryan sandstone figure — not a Gupta bronze; its polish is the clue to its date.
कला का इतिहास — भारतीय और विश्व
Indian painting — Mughal, Rajput, Pahari and the Patna Kalam
Mughal painting — book illustration and portraiture at the imperial court.
Rajput painting — the courts of Rajasthan, with flat, bright colour and devotional themes; Kishangarh's Bani Thani by Nihal Chand, with its long-eyed profile, is the best known.
Pahari painting — the hill courts of the Himalaya: bold Basohli and lyrical Kangra, famous for scenes of Radha and Krishna.
The Patna Kalam (Patna school)
The Company school — the wider name for Indian painting made for British buyers in this period; the Patna Kalam is its most distinctive regional form.
The trap: the Patna Kalam painted common people at work, not court scenes — that choice of subject is what sets it apart from Mughal and Rajput painting.
कला का इतिहास — भारतीय और विश्व
Modern Indian art
| Artist or movement | What to remember |
|---|---|
| Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) | oil paintings of mythological scenes in a European realist manner; his own press printed cheap oleographs that carried the images into ordinary homes |
| Bengal School | a revival of Indian themes and techniques against Western academic art; Abanindranath Tagore's Bharat Mata (1905), painted in the Swadeshi years |
| Nandalal Bose | Abanindranath's pupil at Santiniketan; he and his students illustrated the original Constitution of India |
| Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) | joined Western modernism with Indian subjects — Three Girls (1935) |
| Progressive Artists' Group | founded in Bombay in 1947 by F. N. Souza, with S. H. Raza, M. F. Husain, K. H. Ara, H. A. Gade and S. K. Bakre, to make a modern art for independent India |
| Jamini Roy | bold, simplified forms drawn from the folk painting of Bengal |
Movements in a sentence — Ravi Varma brought Western realism; the Bengal School turned back to Indian sources; Sher-Gil and the Progressives made Indian art modern on its own terms.
The trap: Bharat Mata (1905) is by Abanindranath Tagore of the Bengal School, not by Raja Ravi Varma, whose goddesses are the more familiar images.
कला का इतिहास — भारतीय और विश्व
World art — the landmarks a paper asks
| Movement | Artist and work | What it brought |
|---|---|---|
| Renaissance (Italy, 15th–16th centuries) | Leonardo da Vinci — Mona Lisa, The Last Supper | perspective, anatomy, soft modelling of light (sfumato) |
| Michelangelo — the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the marble David | the heroic human figure | |
| Raphael — The School of Athens | balanced, harmonious composition | |
| Impressionism (France, 1870s) | Claude Monet — Impression, Sunrise (1872), which gave the movement its name | painting outdoors, broken brushwork, the changing effects of light |
| Post-Impressionism | Vincent van Gogh — The Starry Night (1889) | expressive colour and swirling brushwork |
| Cubism (early 20th century) | Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque; Picasso's Guernica (1937), on the bombing of a Spanish town | showing an object from several viewpoints at once |
| Surrealism | Salvador Dalí — The Persistence of Memory (melting clocks) | the world of dreams |
Linear perspective — worked out by the architect Filippo Brunelleschi in Florence early in the 15th century, it let Renaissance painters create convincing depth on a flat surface.
The trap: Impressionism took its name from Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise — not from Van Gogh, who came after it as a Post-Impressionist.
कला का इतिहास — भारतीय और विश्व
Points to Remember