Maharana Bhim Singh and Retinue Embark on a Hunt

While this particular painting depicts Maharana Bhim Singh as a towering, divinely radiating monarch, history remembers his actual reign (1778–1828) as a period of profound weakness. Beset by Maratha raids, internal court factions, and near-bankruptcy, he was eventually forced to sign away Mewar’s sovereignty under a protection treaty with the British East India Company in 1818. The painting is a masterclass in propaganda, using art to fabricate a fantasy of supreme, stable control when the state was actually fracturing. Chokha, alongside his father Bagta, was instrumental in developing a highly specific stylistic evolution away from traditional, flat Mewar painting. Known as the Devgarh school (a feudal sub-state of Mewar), their family style introduced a preference for deep, smoky shading and stylized silhouettes. If you look closely at the underbellies of the horses and the faces of the retinue in this work, you can see these smooth, subtle tonal gradations, which added a unprecedented sense of physical volume to the figures. This specific layout, featuring Maharana Bhim Singh on a rearing horse perfectly hemmed in by an identical, compression-styled crowd of attendants, was an absolute hit in the Rajasthani art market. It was replicated multiple times by the court. Aside from this masterpiece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, closely related versions or sister paintings of this exact composition exist in the Harvard Art Museums and the San Diego Museum of Art.