Thanjavur painting.

Thanjavur painting is the art form that most accurately summarises the city — devotional in subject, miniature in scale, gilded to the point of vulgarity by Western academic standards, and unbroken in its workshop lineage from the eighteenth century to the present afternoon. It is also the city's most exported cultural product.

The form is small. A typical panel runs twelve by fifteen inches. It is dense — gold leaf, semi-precious stones, glass beads, raised gesso, mineral pigments — and frontal. The deity looks at you. The composition does not aspire to depth in the European sense; it aspires to the saturation of devotional looking.

What it is.

A Thanjavur painting is a devotional icon executed on a prepared wooden panel, with raised gesso ornament covered in 22-carat gold leaf, set with cut glass and semi-precious stones, and painted in opaque mineral pigments. The subject is almost always a deity — Krishna, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Rama, Murugan, Ganesha — rendered in a frontal, hieratic pose with the attributes of the iconography intact.

It is not a folk form. It is a court form, developed under royal patronage, executed in professional workshops, and originally hung in palace rooms and the household shrines of the merchant elite. The folk variants — paper, no gold — appeared later and are a separate thing.

The Maratha court origins.

After 1674, when the Marathas under Venkoji took Thanjavur from the Nayaks, the royal kitchen, the court repertoire, and the workshop traditions of the city acquired a Konkan accent. The painting form, in its mature gold-leaf state, is the product of the long reign of Serfoji II (r. 1798–1832) — the Maratha king who was also Thanjavur's great institutional patron, founder of the modern Saraswathi Mahal library, correspondent of William Carey at Serampore, and an obsessive collector.

Serfoji's workshops drew on three pre-existing lineages: the Nayak court painting of the seventeenth century, the temple muralists of the Chola revival period, and the Maratha miniature tradition imported from the Deccan. What emerged was a distinctly Thanjavuri synthesis — flatter than the Mughal miniature, gilded more heavily than the Maratha Deccani tradition, and devotional rather than courtly in subject.

Technique, step by step.

A traditional Thanjavur painting passes through eight or nine distinct stages, each handled by a specialist in the workshop.

1. Board. A jackfruit or teak panel is selected, planed and prepared.
2. Cloth. A fine cotton cloth is glued to the surface to hold the gesso.
3. Gesso. Layers of chalk-and-glue gesso are applied, dried and sanded.
4. Drawing. The composition is drawn in charcoal directly onto the gesso.
5. Raised work. The areas to be gilded — crown, jewellery, throne ornament — are built up in thick gesso paste to a height of two or three millimetres.
6. Stones. Cut glass, semi-precious stones, and pearls are pressed into the raised gesso while it is still wet.
7. Gold leaf. 22-carat gold leaf is applied to the raised work with a natural adhesive and burnished.
8. Painting. The remaining flat surfaces — skin, fabric, sky — are painted in opaque mineral pigments.
9. Detailing. The eyes, fingers, jewellery edges and inscriptions are added last with a fine brush.

Subjects and conventions.

The iconographic repertoire is restricted but deep. Krishna as the infant butter-thief is the most common subject — perhaps a third of all Thanjavur paintings made today. Lakshmi in her two-armed Gajalakshmi form is the second. Saraswati, Rama with Sita, Murugan with his two consorts, Ganesha, and the various Shiva forms make up most of the remainder. The figures look out frontally; the perspective is hieratic; the size of the deity is governed by devotional importance rather than spatial logic.

Decline and revival.

The Maratha court of Thanjavur was dissolved by the British in 1855. The workshops it had sustained declined rapidly through the latter nineteenth century; by 1920 the form was almost extinct, surviving in a handful of family ateliers. The revival came in two phases — a state-led handicraft revival in the 1970s and a market-led collector revival in the 1990s. Today perhaps forty serious workshops operate in the city and the immediate region.

Workshops today.

The serious workshops are not on the tourist circuit. They cluster in the Karanthai and Brihadeswara Nagar quarters of Thanjavur, in Tiruvaiyaru up the Kaveri, and in a handful of locations in Kumbakonam. A visit by appointment, arranged through your hotel, will show you the full process. Expect to spend an hour and to be expected to consider a commission at the end.

Buying a painting.

Three questions decide whether a piece is genuine. First, is the gold real 22-carat leaf or is it gilding paint? Run a thumbnail across it; real gold leaf burnishes. Second, are the stones glass-and-paste or are they semi-precious? The dealer should be able to name the stones. Third, is the support a properly prepared wooden panel or is it canvas-on-board? Either is acceptable but the price points differ.