Garden & Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur

"Would you like to reach Nirvana?" asked the Times of London when Garden & Cosmos traveled to the British Museum in 2009. Deemed "remarkable," by the Independent, the highly praised exhibition featured exquisite paintings that had never been displayed outside of India and opened viewers' eyes to the culture of Jodhpur in Rajasthan in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

The catalog, Garden & Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, is a richly illustrated volume that portrays all the visual splendor of the exhibition. Images of sensuous parties in royal court pavilions and idyllic landscapes for Hindu deities capture the appeal of lush gardens in a desert kingdom. Large fields of shimmering, pulsating color convey the nature of the cosmos, a sublimely minimal style inspired by hatha-yoga metaphysics. The authors meticulously describe and date each painting; identify manuscripts, artists, subjects, and personages; and situate the paintings in the geographic, cultural, and historical landscape of north India. Winner of the prestigious 2010 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award presented by the College Art Association.  338-page paperback book with color illustrations throughout.

Museum Provenance

As Smithsonian museums, the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery hold in trust the nation’s extraordinary collections of Asian art and of American art of the late nineteenth-century aesthetic movement. Our mission is to encourage enjoyment and understanding of the arts of Asia and the cultures that produced them. We use works of art to inspire study and provoke thought.

Every Smithsonian purchase will arrive with a museum provenance card explaining how it is adapted from or inspired by an object or objects in our collection.