How and why did painters centre sensory experience, enchanting emotions, and cultural landscapes in South Asia? A Splendid Land is the first exhibition to address this question through dazzling paintings made over a period of two hundred years, spanning from Mughal to colonial India, that have never been published or exhibited in the United States.

Around 1700, artists in Udaipur began creating large, immersive paintings to convey the mood (bhava) 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. By examining social networks, ecological relations, and pleasurable pursuits, and by drawing upon previously untranslated sources and engaging with the history of the senses, A Splendid Land opens early modern art history to new interpretative possibilities.