The Archive & Cabinet - The Drawing Before the Painting

The Drawing Before the Painting:

Indian Drawings and the Artist’s Process

Indian paintings are often encountered as finished images: richly colored, carefully resolved, and seemingly fully conceived. Yet before color was applied—and sometimes before a composition was fully decided—there was the drawing.

Surviving Indian drawings reveal aspects of artistic practice that finished paintings frequently conceal. They preserve corrections, abandoned ideas, repeated figures, architectural schemes, workshop annotations, and the physical traces of use. Some were preparatory studies for paintings or manuscript illustrations. Others functioned as workshop models or repositories of forms that could be reused and transformed. Still others appear to have been valued as independent works for the refinement and expressive quality of their line.¹

Taken together, they show drawing not as a secondary or incomplete branch of Indian painting, but as one of its essential intellectual and practical foundations.

Drawing as Thought

One of the most revealing qualities of a preparatory drawing is its ability to preserve hesitation and revision.

A finished painting usually presents only the artist’s final decisions. Earlier possibilities have been concealed beneath pigment or eliminated altogether. In a drawing, however, those previous stages may remain visible.

Harihara with Attendants, Kangra, Himachal Pradesh, c. 1800–1820. Black ink with white opaque watercolor on paper. 27.9 × 17.8 cm. Archive & Cabinet, WOP-024.

The Kangra drawing of Harihara with Attendants provides an unusually clear example. Beneath the visible composition lies an earlier stage of design in which Ganesha, a lingam, ascetics, and other strongly Shaivite elements were included. These motifs were subsequently suppressed beneath a thin layer of white opaque watercolor, and portions of the composition were redrawn.

The alterations appear to be more than technical corrections. They may reflect a reconsideration of the iconographic balance of Harihara, the composite form of Vishnu and Shiva. By reducing some of the explicitly Shaivite imagery, the artist seems to have sought a more balanced expression of the deity’s dual identity.

Here drawing becomes something very close to visible thought. The sheet records not only what the artist decided to include, but what he decided to remove.

Building the Composition

Other drawings reveal the method by which highly complex narrative paintings were assembled before color was introduced.

Yudhisthira and Arjuna in Conversation, preparatory drawing from the “Small” Bhagavata Purana series, attributed to the workshop of Manaku, Guler, c. 1740. Black ink on paper. 29.8 × 19.7 cm. Archive & Cabinet, WOP-022.

The unfinished “Small Guler” Bhagavata Purana is one of the clearest surviving demonstrations of Pahari preparatory practice. Related sheets attributed to Manaku preserve visible stages of preparatory work, including initial drawing, erasure, and later refinement in ink.²

The present drawing similarly places its principal figures within an elaborate architectural environment of terraces, pavilions, arcades, gateways, and subsidiary spaces. These elements have already been carefully coordinated before the application of color.

Architecture here is not simply background. It establishes hierarchy, movement, and narrative structure. Different zones of the palace guide the viewer through the composition while locating figures according to their role within the episode.

Such sheets remind us that the great Pahari manuscript projects were not improvised directly in pigment. Their apparent ease rests upon rigorous compositional planning. Manaku’s major narrative series repeatedly required the resolution of complex textual episodes into clear pictorial structures, an achievement for which his drawings are particularly important evidence.³

Drawing Across a Narrative Cycle

Preparatory drawings could also preserve the working structure of a much larger series.

The Coronation of Rama (Rama Pattabhisheka) and Rama and Sita Receiving the Sage Agastya and Other Rishis, attributed to the workshop of Laharu, Chamba, c. 1750–1765. Red ink on paper. Each 28 × 19 cm. Archive & Cabinet, WOP-087 and WOP-088.

These two red-line drawings from Chamba belong to the tradition of large illustrated Ramayana cycles produced in the Punjab Hills. Their figures are arranged with remarkable clarity, while architecture divides the compositions into orderly pictorial zones.

Unlike the more naturalistic spatial construction increasingly associated with Guler, Chamba painting frequently retained a strong preference for rhythmic organization, direct narrative statement, and compartmentalized space. W. G. Arc her’s foundational survey of Pahari painting and later studies by B. N. Goswamy, Eberhard Fischer, John Seyller, and Jagdish Mittal have emphasized the distinct workshop identities that developed among the hill courts.⁴

The unfinished state of the Chamba sheets is precisely what makes them valuable. Without the intervention of opaque color, the underlying structures of the compositions remain exposed.

Related Chamba preparatory drawings were published by Jagdish Mittal as early as 1955, and later scholarship has continued to use such sheets as evidence for the working methods of Pahari ateliers.⁵ They demonstrate that drawings were not incidental by-products of painting but integral stages in the planning and transmission of large narrative programs.

The Workshop Sheet

Not every drawing was intended to become an individual painting.

Some appear instead to have functioned as working objects within an atelier: surfaces on which artists developed ideas, preserved compositions, or recorded figures for later use.

Kamsa and Devaki During the Wedding Procession; verso: A Prince with His Lover, Guler, c. 1780–1800. Black ink on paper. 25.4 × 19 cm. Archive & Cabinet, WOP-027.

This double-sided Guler sheet preserves two unrelated subjects. On the recto is a ceremonial procession probably connected with the episode in which Kamsa attacks Devaki after hearing the prophecy of his future death. On the verso, a prince sits intimately with his lover beneath a cusped arch.

The use of both sides is significant. It suggests that the sheet was valued principally as a working resource rather than as a pristine presentation object. Its importance lay in the images it preserved.

This accords with the broader evidence for workshop practice in Indian painting. Drawings could circulate as models, compositional aids, and records of useful forms, while painters within familial ateliers drew upon an inherited repertoire of figures and pictorial solutions.⁶

The physical condition of such sheets frequently reinforces this interpretation. Staining, abrasions, old mounting traces, annotations, dealer marks, and other signs of handling are not simply later imperfections. In many cases they form part of the history of the drawing as an object that was used, preserved, and circulated.

From Study to Finished Painting

Perhaps the clearest demonstration of the relationship between drawing and painting occurs when a surviving study can be connected with a known finished composition.

Fragment of a Preparatory Study for Brijnathji and Durjan Sal Singh Sight a Pride of Lions, attributed to the Kotah Master, Kotah, c. 1730–1735. Black ink on paper. Archive & Cabinet, WOP-025.

This surviving fragment corresponds to the male lion in the celebrated painting Brijnathji and Durjan Sal Singh Sight a Pride of Lions, now in the Rao Madho Singh Trust Museum at Fort Kotah.

In isolation, the animal is remarkably direct. A small number of assured contours describe the weight of the body, the movement of the legs, the turn of the head, and the animal’s latent aggression.

The relationship between individual preparatory studies and ambitious hunting compositions is especially important in early Kotah painting, where artists developed an extraordinary vocabulary for movement, landscape, animals, and royal sport. Milo C. Beach has identified the early Kotah masters as among the most distinctive painters working in Rajasthan during the eighteenth century.⁷

The fragment demonstrates how an individual animal might be resolved independently before being incorporated into a much larger pictorial field.

It therefore has a double life: it is evidence of process, but it is also a compelling drawing in its own right.

Copying, Memory, and Reinvention

Indian workshops operated through transmission as well as invention.

Artists inherited compositions, figure types, gestures, and motifs from earlier painters. These could be copied, adapted, reversed, recombined, and transformed. Such practices were fundamental to the continuity of artistic traditions.

Man Preparing Paan, North India, Mughal, probably Delhi, c. 1720–1740. Ink and opaque watercolor on paper. Archive & Cabinet, WOP-017.

This drawing derives from the attendant in Govardhan’s composition Sheikh Husain Jami and an Attendant. Yet the later artist does not simply reproduce the earlier image. The attendant is extracted from the original composition, reversed, and transformed into the principal subject.

The result is a striking example of artistic quotation. What had originally been a secondary figure becomes an independent study of everyday action.

Such drawings complicate modern ideas of originality. Within Mughal and later North Indian workshops, knowledge of earlier models could be fundamental to artistic training and production. John Seyller has emphasized the importance of workshop organization, model transmission, and collaborative practice in understanding Indian painting.⁸ Copying could function not merely as duplication but as study, preservation, homage, or creative reinterpretation.

The Face as a Working Model

Portrait drawings reveal another function of the medium: the preservation of likeness.

In court painting, a recognizable face could be more important than the precise arrangement of garments or surroundings. Artists therefore needed reliable models from which a sitter’s physiognomy might be reproduced.

Portrait of Raja Ishri Chand, Nalagarh, c. 1875–1900. Black ink and opaque watercolor on paper. 31 × 22 cm. Archive & Cabinet, WOP-057.

In this late nineteenth-century portrait study, the ruler’s face is considerably more resolved than much of the surrounding figure. The verso preserves another study of the head, reinforcing the likelihood that the sheet served as a working reference for the sitter’s likeness.

The drawing also extends the chronology of the discussion. The use of drawn models and portrait studies was not confined to the celebrated eighteenth-century ateliers of Mughal and Pahari painting. Related practices continued within regional court traditions well into the nineteenth century, even as patronage, materials, and pictorial conventions changed.⁹

The Artist at Work

Rarely, a drawing does something even more direct: it shows us the workshop itself.

A Pichwai Artist at Work, Nathadwara, Rajasthan, c. 1900–1920. Black ink on paper. 21.6 × 13.3 cm. Archive & Cabinet, WOP-018.

The Nathadwara drawing of a pichwai painter at work is remarkable precisely because it depicts the act of image-making itself. The painter sits before a large textile image while an assistant prepares materials nearby. Brushes, bowls, vessels, and a painter’s box occupy the surrounding space.

The scene reveals painting as a material and collaborative activity grounded in tools, inherited knowledge, workshop routine, and religious practice. Nathadwara painting developed in close association with the worship of Shrinathji and the Pushtimarg tradition, while pichwais formed part of an extensive system of ritual display within the temple environment.¹⁰ Artists frequently worked within hereditary or workshop structures, producing painted textiles, murals, paper paintings, and other devotional images.

By the early twentieth century, this tradition remained vigorous. The drawing therefore provides an unusually literal counterpart to the preparatory sheets discussed elsewhere in this essay: here we see not merely the evidence left by artistic labor, but the artist engaged in that labor.

When the Drawing Is the Work

It would be misleading, however, to treat every Indian drawing merely as a stage on the way to something else.

Some drawings possess a degree of refinement and completeness that suggests they could be appreciated principally for their own linear beauty.

Lovers in an Embrace, Hyderabad, Deccan, c. 1790–1800. Black ink on paper, mounted within later borders. 13 × 9 cm. Archive & Cabinet, WOP-015.

The small Hyderabad drawing Lovers in an Embrace depends almost entirely upon line. The two figures sit close together, their bodies and gazes forming an intimate, self-contained composition. Floral and architectural details are present but restrained.

Nothing essential seems absent.

Its surviving borders suggest that the drawing was at some point incorporated into an album, where it could be viewed as an independent work. The collecting and album presentation of drawings and paintings had long been an important feature of Mughal and Deccani court culture, allowing individual images to circulate outside the narrative manuscripts or commissions from which such practices had originally developed.¹¹

Here the premise of “the drawing before the painting” reaches its limit. There may have been no intended painting afterward.

The line itself was sufficient.

What Drawings Preserve

Indian drawings frequently survive in fragmentary or altered states. They may be stained, abraded, trimmed, mounted, annotated, or otherwise marked by centuries of use and ownership. Yet these physical histories can make them more revealing rather than less.

A finished painting shows artistic resolution, whereas a drawing may show artistic decision.

It can preserve an earlier composition beneath white pigment, an architectural scheme before color, a figure adapted from an older master, the repeated likeness of a ruler, an animal studied before entering a hunt scene, or both sides of a sheet used for unrelated ideas.

These are not merely incomplete pictures. They are records of process, memory, collaboration, revision, and transmission.

To look closely at an Indian drawing is therefore to come unusually near to the act of making itself.

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Notes

1. For broad discussions of Indian painting practice, workshop organization, and the role of drawings, see Milo C. Beach, Eberhard Fischer, and B. N. Goswamy, eds., Masters of Indian Painting, 1100–1900, 2 vols. (Zurich: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 2011).

2. Comparable drawings from Manaku’s unfinished “Small Guler” Bhagavata Purana preserve clearly visible stages of preparatory work, including initial drawing, erasure, and later refinement in ink. See related works in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

3. On Manaku, his narrative series, and the importance of preparatory drawings in his practice, see Beach, Fischer, and Goswamy, Masters of Indian Painting, 1100–1900.

4. W. G. Archer, Indian Paintings from the Punjab Hills: A Survey and History of Pahari Miniature Painting, 2 vols. (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973); B. N. Goswamy and Eberhard Fischer, Pahari Masters: Court Painters of Northern India (Zurich: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 1992); John Seyller and Jagdish Mittal, Pahari Drawings in the Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum of Indian Art (Hyderabad: Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum of Indian Art, 2013).

5. Jagdish Mittal, “Some Ramayana and Bhagawata Drawings of Chamba,” Marg 8, no. 3 (1955): 26–31.

6. On familial ateliers, workshop continuity, and the transmission of pictorial models in Pahari painting, see Goswamy and Fischer, Pahari Masters, and Seyller and Mittal, Pahari Drawings.

7. Milo C. Beach, “Masters of Early Kota Painting,” in Masters of Indian Painting, 1100–1900, vol. 2, ed. Milo C. Beach, Eberhard Fischer, and B. N. Goswamy (Zurich: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 2011), 459–478.

8. John Seyller, “Painting Workshops in Mughal India,” in Masters of Indian Painting, 1100–1900, vol. 2, ed. Milo C. Beach, Eberhard Fischer, and B. N. Goswamy (Zurich: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 2011), 799–804.

9. Tryna Lyons, “Indian Painting from 1825 to 1900,” in Masters of Indian Painting, 1100–1900, vol. 2, ed. Milo C. Beach, Eberhard Fischer, and B. N. Goswamy (Zurich: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 2011), 753–758.

10. For Nathadwara painting and pichwai production, see studies of the Shrinathji temple tradition and the hereditary workshops associated with Nathadwara.

11. For the broader courtly culture of manuscript, album, and independent painting in the Deccan, see Navina Najat Haidar and Marika Sardar, eds., Sultans of the South: Arts of India’s Deccan Courts, 1323–1687 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011).

Selected References

Archer, W. G. Indian Paintings from the Punjab Hills: A Survey and History of Pahari Miniature Painting. 2 vols. London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973.

Beach, Milo C., Eberhard Fischer, and B. N. Goswamy, eds. Masters of Indian Painting, 1100–1900. 2 vols. Zurich: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 2011.

Goswamy, B. N., and Eberhard Fischer. Pahari Masters: Court Painters of Northern India. Zurich: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 1992.

Haidar, Navina Najat, and Marika Sardar, eds. Sultans of the South: Arts of India’s Deccan Courts, 1323–1687. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011.

Mittal, Jagdish. “Some Ramayana and Bhagawata Drawings of Chamba.” Marg 8, no. 3 (1955): 26–31.

Seyller, John, and Jagdish Mittal. Pahari Drawings in the Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum of Indian Art. Hyderabad: Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum of Indian Art, 2013.

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All illustrated works are from the Archive & Cabinet collection. Individual catalogue entries may be found in the Works on Paper section of the Archive.

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