A lavishly illustrated volume that explores the immersive aesthetics and emotional resonance of paintings from the lake city of Udaipur.
 
Around 1700, artists in Udaipur began creating large, immersive paintings to convey the mood of the city’s palaces, lakes, and mountains. A Splendid Land explores how painters depicted places, mapped terrains, and triggered memories to foster political and personal attachments to land through dazzling paintings that were made over a two-century period spanning from Mughal to colonial India—paintings which have never before been published or exhibited in the United States. The book opens up new interpretative possibilities by displacing the figure of the king to examine social networks, cultural landscapes, pleasure, and politics; by drawing upon previously untranslated sources; and by engaging with the latest scholarship on the history of the senses.