Udaya

Mysore painting

ಮೈಸೂರು ಚಿತ್ರಕಲೆ

Also Mysore traditional painting.

Painting and drawing Karnataka

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What it is#

Mysore painting is the court style of the Wodeyar kings of Karnataka: devotional panels of gods and goddesses, small in scale, finished to a jeweller’s level of detail, and raised in low relief with gold. It is often described alongside Tanjore painting and the two are genuinely close, having separated from a shared Vijayanagara ancestry after that empire fell. The difference is visible at a glance once it is pointed out. Tanjore is thickly encrusted and set with stones; Mysore is flatter, finer in line, and uses its gold as a thin worked surface rather than as a mass.

How it is built#

The ground is paper or cloth pasted to wood and sized with a paste of zinc oxide and gum. The drawing is done first and the areas to be raised are built up with the same paste in low relief, then covered with gold leaf and burnished and tooled so that the pattern of a crown or a border catches the light. Colours were made from vegetable and mineral sources and laid on in thin washes, leaving the line visible. The faces are the test: a Mysore painting is judged on the modelling of the face and the drawing of the eyes, which are done last and by the senior hand.

How it is learnt#

The question a family actually has

Taught by copying, which is the point rather than a shortcut: a student spends the first two or three years reproducing the standard compositions line for line, because the iconography is fixed and the proportions are what is being learnt. The gesso work and gold leaf come after the drawing is sound, and the faces last of all. Five years is the usual figure before independent work, and a single panel can take a painter two or three months. Most learning is still a matter of sitting beside somebody, and the pigments and the gesso recipe are the part most often lost.

Whose lineage is whose#

Where a claim is contested, by whom

The style was kept by the Mysore court, badly disrupted in the wars of the eighteenth century and deliberately revived by Krishnaraja Wodeyar III in the nineteenth, who housed painters and commissioned the sets of devotional panels that most surviving work comes from. Families of painters in Mysore and Srirangapatna held it afterwards with little state support, and the number working fell to a handful. It now has a geographical indication tag and is taught at the Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts in Mysore, which has kept it alive without making it common.

Worth knowing#

What the gold is doing

Both Mysore and Tanjore use gold leaf, and the usual explanation, that it signifies divinity, is true and not very useful. The working reason is light. These were panels for a dim room lit by oil lamps, where flat paint disappears and a low relief surface catches a moving flame and seems to shift. Seen under electric light in a gallery the effect is largely lost, which is why photographs of these paintings tend to disappoint people who have seen one in a house.

The two schools and the one ancestor

Mysore and Tanjore painters both trace themselves to the painters who scattered when Vijayanagara fell in 1565, some going south to the Nayaka courts and some west to the Wodeyars. The shared inheritance shows in the compositions, which are often nearly identical, and the divergence shows in the surface. Which is the elder is argued in both places. The honest answer is that neither is: the parent is gone and these are the two survivors.

Where the regions differ#

  • Tamil
  • Kerala
  • Telugu
  • Kannada
  • North
  • Maharashtra
  • Bengal
  • Punjab
  • Assam
  • Sri Lanka
  • Nepal
  • Gujarat
  • Odisha
  • Mithila
  • Kashmir
  • Tulu Nadu
  • manipur
  • rajasthan
  • konkani
  • sindhi
  • jharkhand
  • himalayan
  • kodava
Where it is kept: 3 of the 23 traditions this app follows. The filled one is where it is from.
Karnataka
The court style of Mysore, kept by the Wodeyars and now taught in the city; the Dasara panels are its best known subjects.
Tamil Nadu
Tanjore painting is the sibling style, thicker in its gesso and set with stones, and the two are regularly mistaken for each other.
Andhra and Telangana
The Vijayanagara and Nayaka painting both descend from was centred in what is now Andhra, and the surviving murals there are the common ancestor.

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