Nihal Chand
Painting
Artworks
In Collections
Nihal Chand (c. 1710 – after 1782) was the pre-eminent painter of the Kishangarh school, a Rajput miniature tradition that flourished in the small princely state of Kishangarh in eighteenth-century Rajasthan. Born into a family of hereditary court officials and artists, he trained under the Mughal-schooled master Bhavanidas before rising to become chief painter to the poet-prince Raja Savant Singh. Under Savant Singh's patronage, Nihal Chand originated the elongated, idealised Kishangarh facial idiom, giving enduring visual form to the Radha-Krishna romance through the "Bani Thani" image, a work later generations would call the "Mona Lisa of India," and one still regarded as the summit of Rajput romanticism.
