Shri Brijnathji hunting deer with Maharao Durjan Sal, India, Rajasthan, Kota, circa 1725-35

This royal hunting scene depicts Shri Brijnathji, the tutelary deity of the kingdom of Kota, in the foreground hunting a wild gazelle. Kneeling on the ground, holding a golden bow in his left hand, Brijnathji has just shot an arrow into the side of a fleeing gazelle causing it to tumble over. The deity, who is a form of Krishna, wears a saffron sash over his blue torso and a pink dhoti tucked into his boots. With half a halo framing his head, a gold cloth covers most of his green turban, surmounted by a lotus bed. An attendant holding a bow and arrow stands beside him. Brijnathji is accompanied by another haloed figure behind him. Partially hidden by the trees is a young Maharao Durjan Sal of Kota (r.1723-56). Durjan Singh, the third of Bhim Singh’s five sons, came to the throne when he was just over twenty years old. Two female gazelles crouch in the lower right section of the painting. Three attendants wait with the hunting party’s horses in the background. A small group of four gazelles are seen in a clearing trying to escape over the hillside. The figures of the hunters appear highlighted against the dense green background of the forest and the muted blueish grey colour of the sky.

Durjan Sal would frequently be depicted in paintings accompanying Shri Brijnathji, his appearance similar to the deity. This was with the intention of merging the ruler’s identity with that of the god and fostering the concept of ‘divine king’. A comparable composition of Brijnathji and Durjan Sal hunting deer, attributed to the Kota Master and dated to 1735-40, is in the Rao Madho Singh Trust Museum in Kota (S.C. Welch, Gods, Kings and Tigers – The Art of Kotah, Munich, 1997, no.35, pp.146-7). A larger, more elaborate scene dated to circa 1730-40 with Shri Brijnathji and Maharao Durjan Sal in a rocky landscape rendered in a comparably muted colour palette, hunting a rhinoceros, wild buffalo and a pride of lions, from The Howard Hodgkin Collection, is currently on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (acc. no.L.2022.30.21).