The evolution of a particular school and style of painting is important. Although the critical literature on Rajasthani painting is sizeable, the Mewari school has not been the subject of detailed study either from the point of view of historical development or stylistic evolution.
It would appear that although the Mewari School had evolved a definite personality by the mid-seventeenth century, its creative springs had not totally dried up by the end of the seventeenth century. The style continued to develop and mature in the first quarter of the eighteenth century.
The compositional pattern of the paintings is uniform. The artist divides the surface into different zones, and suggests the passage of time through a device of repeating his dramatic personae. Thus Krsna, Krsna and Radha, Radha and the sakhi are repeated several times in the same painting. This is the pictorial counterpart of the narrative technique of the poem. The artist also uses the same technique for expressing different moods, or shades of moods of the two characters. All in all he is closely faithful to the verbal text and attempts to transform each poetic image into a pictorial one. This reliance on the text, however, is neither slavish nor purely illustrative.
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