Tradition · wall painting tradition · India
Shekhawati painted havelis
Also known as Shekhawati, Shekhawati frescoes, Nawalgarh, Mandawa, Marwari havelis
Several thousand merchant houses across the semi-desert towns of Nawalgarh, Mandawa, Ramgarh, Fatehpur and Churu, their courtyards and street facades painted in lime fresco and distemper by itinerant masons between roughly 1830 and 1930 — the largest concentration of painted architecture anywhere in the world.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 27.610, 75.400 (approximate)
Worth knowing
The subjects run from Krishna and the Ramayana to steam trains, motor cars, gramophones, hot-air balloons and Queen Victoria, because the Marwari families who paid for them were trading in Bombay and Calcutta and sent back what they saw. Most of the houses are now empty and the paint is going.
Connections (2)
- Patronage networkMehrangarh & Jodhpur
The Marwari merchant families who painted the Shekhawati havelis made their money on the caravan routes the Rathore state taxed from Mehrangarh, and then in Bombay and Calcutta once the railways came. The frescoes of trains, cars and gramophones are what the money saw at the other end. Both the fort's revenue and the houses' paint come out of the same desert trade.
- Patronage networkJunagarh Fort, Bikaner
The Marwari merchant families who painted the Shekhawati havelis and the Bikaner rulers who filled Junagarh with lacquer and Venetian glass were living off the same thing — the caravan trade between Gujarat, Sindh and the Gangetic plain. When the railways rerouted it the merchants followed the money to Bombay and Calcutta and painted what they found there on their desert walls.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Shekhawati”. Ilay Cooper, The Painted Towns of Shekhawati (1994); Francis Wacziarg and Aman Nath, Rajasthan: The Painted Walls of Shekhavati (1982).
Open Shekhawati painted havelis in the repository →