Indian paintings at the British Museum

Extended till 11 October and well worth seeing, Garden and Cosmos shows 56 paintings from 18th-century Jodhpur, in north-west India. Colourful and detailed, each needs close looking at. If you can't visit the British Museum, do go to the website, where you can see details of a few of the paintings and listen to some extracts from the audio guide. The posters show the monsoon rains - and give you an idea of the intensity and variety of colour -The garden paintings are beautifully detailed - and did I mention colourful? The "cosmos" paintings are wonderful in a different way. They are often triptyches, and start with "the unknowable Absolute" - rendered as a pure gold space, a depiction that these artists invented. Then in the second panel figures appear - and in the third, more figures - showing, for example, the universe divided into consciousness and matter. In contrast to the many greens in the garden paintings, the colouring in the "cosmos rooms" is gold, silver, orange, flesh tones, red, ochre, blue, and black.

The captions in the exhibition are very informative, but the printed guide to the exhibition is the most useless I've ever seen - it doesn't even have any of the basic information from the main explanations, the sort of information you might need for refreshing your memory. Perhaps the audio guide is meant to replace the written guide, or you're meant to go to the website for helpful information?

In Room 3, a small room near the front entrance of the museum, is this large painting on silk, showing 200 different trees. It was shown in an exhibition about 20th century items in the museum, a good 10 years ago, and I have a catalogue of that exhibition ... somewhere ... Searching for it has turned up all sorts of interesting things. Is this distraction why it takes so long to write a blog post? (Dear gods, make me focused - but not just yet...)
This current exhibition is called Imagining the Forest and is on till 4th October.The trees are copies from manuscripts in the Orissa State Library, and the painting was done about 1980 - it was commissioned as part of an official scheme to enable Indian textile artists to continue practising their skills..

You can see one of the original manuscripts here - it's on palm leaves - five strips - and shows Krishna with the gopis (female cow-herders).
The Garden and Cosmos exhibition has a series of marvellous paintings of the story of Krishna and the gopis - in one they are wandering in the forest searching for him, one or two brightly-robed women appearing between the trunks of each carefully-delineated tree - those paintings are about a metre long, and on paper.