Darshan of Krishna

Devidasa of Nurpur and Golu are the artists who have created this piece. Kirpal was the descendant of this family of artists and each of these three generation of painters left a series of illustrations for the Rasamanjari. Most of their themes focus on aspects of the hero and heroine and catalogues the many aspects of love such as longing, rejection, deception, among others. Together with works attributed to these artists, their three versions of this text comprise a corpus of work that is unique in the Indian painting style. These paintings dominated the use of thick pigments, polished colours, monochromatic backgrounds devoid of descriptive details, and occasionally, they include applied lustrous green beetle wings and dots of shell-lime-body-white that stand in relief to the picture surface Devadasa undoubtedly had an access to his father's sketches. Even so, his series diverges in two significant respects, he does not employ the beetle wings and does not adopt Krishna as his hero. His works are situated more evidently in the present, with a patron- prince as the main protagonist. Whether or not thr latter change reflects the wish of his patron this cannot be determined. The Nurpur masters as they were called were based in the Basholi region of Jammu. The work is opaque watercolour with silver and gold on paper.