Colonial-Period Court Painting and the Case of Bikaner

Molly Emma Aitken, Archives of Asian Art, Volume 67, April, 2017. ©2019 Duke University Press. All Rights Reserved. Nineteenth-century court painters in India’s princely states reconfigured traditional portraiture to address British, Indian courtly and local values and conventions. At Bikaner, a father and son, Rahim and Chotu, experimented with a Continue Reading

The Laud Rāgamālā Album, Bikaner, and the Sociability of Subimperial Painting

The Laud Ragamala Album, Bikaner, and the Sociability of Subimperial Painting is a tale of two present-day “Indiana Joneses”art historian Professor Molly Emma Aitken and Connoisseur Shanane Davis who made an extraordinary discovery regarding the most famous Indian muraqqa (album book with miniature paintings and calligraphy) found in a European Continue Reading