Tanjore painting
தஞ்சாவூர் ஓவியம்
Also Thanjavur painting, Palagai padam.
Painting and drawing Tamil Nadu
What it is
A Tanjore painting is a devotional panel built up in relief on a wooden board, with gold leaf laid over raised gesso and set with stones, so that it catches lamplight in a dark puja room. The figures are frontal, round faced and almond eyed, usually a single deity with attendants in an arch. It is not a painting in the usual sense but a constructed object, and it is made to be looked at by lamp rather than by daylight, which is why photographs of them generally look flat and disappointing.
How it is built
A plank of jackwood is covered with cloth and a paste of chalk and gum, smoothed, and the composition drawn on it. The areas to be raised are built up with gesso, the muk, in layers and carved while soft. Gold leaf of twenty two carat is laid over the raised work and burnished. Stones, originally semi precious and now usually glass, are set into the gesso. The flat areas are painted in opaque colour, traditionally mineral and vegetable. A finished panel is framed in wood and is heavy.
How it is learnt
The question a family actually has
Learnt by apprenticeship in a workshop, beginning with grinding and preparing the board and the gesso, which may take a year before any drawing is allowed. Gold leaf work comes later because the material is unforgiving and expensive. Three to five years makes a competent hand and a master takes much longer. Courses of a few months now exist and produce decorative work; practitioners distinguish between that and workshop training plainly and without much tact.
Whose lineage is whose
Where a claim is contested, by whom
The form grew under the Maratha rulers of Thanjavur in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, drawing on Nayaka wall painting and on Deccani and European elements, and the Rajus and Naidus of Thanjavur and Tiruchirappalli were the painting families. It has a Geographical Indication registration. The modern market has pulled it towards mass production with glass stones, printed outlines and synthetic gold, which the traditional workshops regard as a different product sold under the same name; buyers are generally not told which they are getting.
Worth knowing
Made for lamplight
The gold and the stones are not ornament for its own sake. A puja room is lit by one or two oil lamps, and a flat painted panel disappears in that light. Raised gold catches a moving flame and the whole figure seems to shift as the lamp flickers, which is the effect the form was built for. Seen under an electric tube light or photographed with a flash it looks gaudy, and the complaint that the paintings are garish usually comes from people who have only seen them lit wrongly.
Baby Krishna, over and over
The commonest subject by a long way is the infant Krishna crawling with a ball of butter, and a workshop may produce the same composition hundreds of times over a career. Repetition is not considered a failure of invention: the composition is settled and what varies is the quality of the gesso, the gold and the face. Buyers compare workshops on the same subject the way one might compare two castings of the same bronze, and a good Krishna face is what a painter is known for.
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
- Tamil Nadu
- Thanjavur and Tiruchirappalli are the making centres, with the Maratha court origin and a Geographical Indication registration.
- Andhra and Telangana
- Mysore painting is the nearest relative and the Andhra temple towns buy and commission the Thanjavur work.
- Karnataka
- Mysore painting uses gesso more sparingly and no stones, and is flatter and more delicate; the two are often confused.
Connected to
Deities
Festivals
Temples
Related arts