India’s abundant literary and poetic forms describe sacred rivers and mountains, praise cities and palaces, and parse the moods evoked by diverse terrains. In contrast, India’s painters rarely depicted landscapes. Yet between 1700 and 1900, court artists in Udaipur, a Hindu court in northwest India, produced hundreds of paintings that represent the kingdom’s riverine plains, forested hillsides, and man-made lakes. They are typically interpreted as royal portraits. In this talk, curator Debra Diamond decenters the king to focus on the cultural and ecological contexts of a significant but little-known painting in the Freer collection. She demonstrates how artists conjured local geographies and environmental interventions to evoke moods and strengthen social bonds. The talk is a sneak peek at research that Dr. Diamond is preparing for the museum’s 2022–23 exhibition A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, which she will co-curate with Dr. Dipti Khera, associate professor of art history at New York University. 
  
A specialist in Indian painting and the visual culture of yoga, Debra Diamond received her PhD in South Asian art history from Columbia University. Since joining the museum in 2000, she has received numerous awards for her research and for the exhibitions Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice Across Asia (2017–22), Yoga: The Art of Transformation (2013–14) and Garden and Cosmos: Royal Art of Jodhpur (2008–9). In 2017, at the Freer Gallery of Art, she showcased the museum’s South Asian collection in Body Image: Arts from the Indian Subcontinent. 
 
This talk is part of the monthly lunchtime series Sneak Peek: New Research from the Freer and Sackler, where museum staff present in-depth, personal perspectives on and discuss ongoing research connected to works in the Freer and Sackler collections. 
 
Register here: https://smithsonian.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_msszAefJTB-f68QhUskeNg 
 
Image: 
Maharana Sangram Singh hunting in the Debari Hills 
Udaipur, ca. 1720–30  
Opaque watercolor and gold on paper 
Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment 
Freer Gallery of Art F1992.28