At the turn of the 18th century, one of the royal families in the Pahari region in the foothills of the Himalayas commissioned a colourful set of paintings depicting the Ramayana – the ancient Sanskrit text that relates the adventures of Rama, one of the avatars of Vishnu. Sometime in the 1760s this unbound series began to be dispersed between royal collections, and whether or not it was the Shangri kingdom that commissioned the work originally, by the mid 20th century many of the paintings had ended up in the hands of the Shangri royal family. This exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art draws from 12 collections to present 40 of these lively, vivid paintings (19 April–16 August). Also on view is ‘Pahari Paintings: Art and Stories’ (until 23 August), a display of work from the museum’s collection that was once owned by Catherine Benkaim, a leading scholar of Pahari painting, and her husband, Ralph Benkaim, who died in 2001.
Find out more from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s website.
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