render appearances with exquisite delicacy but was also acutely aware of
rhythmical elegance. And it is this which constantly characterized his
work, his greatest achievement being the creation of a local manner for
portraying Radha and Krishna.[89] Radha was endowed with great arched
eyebrows and long eyes--the end of the eye being tilted so as to join the
downward sweeping line of the eyebrow while Krishna was given a slender
receding forehead and narrow waist. Each was made to seem the acme of
elegance and the result was a conception of Krishna and his love as the
very embodiment of aristocratic breeding.

The same sense of aristocratic loveliness is conveyed by a scene of
dancing figures almost life size in the palace library at Jaipur.[90]
Painted under Raja Pratap Singh (1779-1803) the picture shows ladies of
the palace impersonating Radha and Krishna dancing together attended by
girl musicians.[91] Against a pale green background, the figures, dressed
in greenish yellow, pale greyish blue and the purest white, posture with
calm assured grace, while the pure tones and exquisite line-work invest
the scene with gay and luminous clarity. We do not know the circumstances
in which this great picture was painted but the existence of another
large-scale picture portraying the circular dance--the lines of cowgirls
revolving like flowers, with Radha and Krishna swaying in their
midst--suggests that the Krishna theme had once again inflamed a Rajput
ruler's imagination.[92]

Such groups of paintings are, at most, exquisite exceptions and it is
rather in the Rajput states of the Punjab Hills--an area remote and quite
distinct from Rajasthan--that the theme of Krishna the divine lover
received its most enraptured expression in the eighteenth century. Until
the second half of the seventeenth century this stretch of country
bordering the Western Himalayas seems to have had no kind of painting