Rao Jagat Singh of Kota at ease in a garden

The second ruler of the newly independent kingdom of Kota, Rao Jagat Singh, is enjoying sensory pleasures in a garden with watercourses and fountains. The artist used an ingenious pictorial device, a white circular “summer carpet,” upon which the Rao’s throne and condiments are arrayed. The exuberance of the garden’s flowers and fountains is suggestively erotic, an undercurrent made more explicit by the placement of pairs of mango and other fruit beneath the throne and also by the pair of cranes enjoying a fountain. This is a picture full of sensual anticipation. As the early rulers of Kota spent much of their lives serving the emperor on campaign in the Deccan, such painting must have been a pleasant diversion from the harsher realties of military life. The dense palette and surface richness suggest links with the Golconda school, from which Rajput ateliers also may have recruited.

About the Artist

Hada Master and the Kota School
Presumably trained in Bundi, Rajasthan, and active in Kota soon after 1631 until the 1660s

In 1631, the Mughal government permitted the sub region of Kota to secede from Bundi and become an independent state. Some artists in the Bundi atelier appear to have taken the opportunity for advancement offered by a new ruler seeking to establish his cultural credentials and moved to Kota. Both Rao Madho Singh (r. 1631–48) and his successor Rao Jagat Singh were enthusiastic patrons and actively recruited painters from Bundi. As the Bundi atelier was strongly influenced by the Chunar Ragamala artists who appear to have had imperial or subimperial Mughal training, so elements of the courtly style were introduced to Bundi and thence disseminated to other court workshops in the Rajasthan region. Kota absorbed and developed the stylistic traits of the Bundi school most directly.

A leading hand at the new Kota school has been named, by Milo Beach, as the Hada Master, distinguished by figure types and characteristically robust elephants. Through his highly original work, in which complex landscape compositions were populated by hunters and hunted, the Hada Master appears to have created a lasting vogue for dramatic hunting scenes and exciting elephant fights. All are distinguished by their theatricality, drama, and emphasis on action. Tiger hunts and raging elephants, locked in combat or running amok, were favorite subjects. Such themes became the hallmark of the Kota school thereafter, persisting into the nineteenth century.

Ragamalas also became an established topic in Rajasthani painting in Kota, as is witnessed by several sets of paintings, which, in their formulaic diagonal architectural recessions into space, perpetuate the Mughal style that migrated to Rajasthan courtesy of the Chunar Ragamala artists. A singular masterwork of the Hada Master is the portrait of his patron Rao Jagat Singh relaxing with female attendants in a lush water garden. The combination of an aerial view of the garden’s grid plan and the setting of figures and flowers in profile within it sets up a pictorial ambiguity that enlivens the composition. This painting belongs to the last decade of the Hada Master’s known career.