Styles / Vernacular & studio

Indian painted photographs

1860–1980. Princely courts and commercial studios of India from the 1860s. Also called Painted photographs or Overpainted photographs.

Where the lights stand

Key: the open sky, all around and above, soft.

Daylight studio: a skylight, a glasshouse or a courtyard, with a backdrop behind the sitter. Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.

Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.

Portrait of Jaswant Singh II of Jodhpur, by Photographer unknown; overpainted by Shivalal, circa 1875 — Portrait of Jaswant Singh II of Jodhpur

Photographer unknown, overpainted by Shivalal, Portrait of Jaswant Singh II of Jodhpur, c. 1875. City Palace Museum, Udaipur (Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation); image via Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Source: Portrait of Jaswant Singh II of Jodhpur at City Palace Museum, Udaipur (lent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 'Wonder of the Age', 2011–12); image via Wikimedia Commons

Overpainted photograph of Maharaja Mohinder Singh of Patiala (or his son Rajendra Singh) enthroned, by Unknown, circa late 19th century — Overpainted photograph of Maharaja Mohinder Singh of Patiala (or his son Rajendra Singh) enthroned

Unknown artist, Overpainted photograph of Maharaja Mohinder Singh of Patiala enthroned, late 19th century. Kenneth Robbins Collection; ACSAA slide 15084, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Source: Overpainted photograph of Maharaja Mohinder Singh of Patiala (or his son Rajendra Singh) enthroned at Wikimedia Commons (ACSAA slide of the Kenneth Robbins Collection, University of Michigan Visual Resources Collections)

Studio and court portraits from India in which a painter takes over the photograph. On an albumen or, later, gelatin silver print of a frontal, still sitter, the face is tinted lightly while jewels, regalia and often the costume, throne and ground are laid on in colour, from transparent tints that heighten the print to opaque gouache or oil that buries it: turquoise, rose, emerald and gold on flat painted grounds, sometimes inside a painted oval and border like a miniature. Each is a unique portrait, of rank at court or a family keepsake, made from the 1860s into the 1970s.

Shoot sheet for your kit The photographs

How the look is made

Photograph the sitter frontal, still and dressed in full regalia, seated on a throne or chair or beside a draped table, and treat the print as the painter's underdrawing.
Keep the face largely photographic and tint it lightly; heighten the costume, turban and jewellery in colour, and at the heavy end, as often at court, bury them in opaque gouache or oil, with pearls, gems and gold picked out in raised white, colour and metal.
Often paint out the studio: turn the background into an even brown, green or dark ground and lay carpets and floors as flat patterned planes, as in Indian miniature painting.
Use dense, saturated colour as a sign of rank: turquoise and rose silks, emerald necklaces, gilt thrones, never the plain grey of an untouched print.
Finish the print as a painting and a keepsake: often, at court, an oval aperture, painted margins with scrolls and ruled borders and an inscription naming the sitter or the painter; then mount and frame it as a single object for the household or court.

Shoot sheet for your kit

Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.

Step 1

Light

Key: the open sky, all around and above, soft.

Daylight studio: a skylight, a glasshouse or a courtyard, with a backdrop behind the sitter.
Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.

Shadow edges: Shadows that fade gradually from light to dark, cast by a large or diffused light: a window, a softbox, a cloudy sky.
Shadow depth: Shadows kept light and full of detail by a reflector, a fill light, bounce or bright surroundings (a low lighting ratio, up to about 3:1: the shadow side at most a stop and a half darker).
Shape & form: Light from the camera’s own position (an on-camera flash, a ring light, a frontal softbox) fills every hollow, so faces and objects look flat, with little shape.

How the style is lit

Soft daylight from one side in a studio or palace room, the sitter against a plain dark or neutral backdrop that the painter later covers.
Even frontal light on a seated or enthroned figure, flat enough that paint rather than shadow models the costume and the ground.

This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.

Step 2

Lens and settings

Start at

50 mmf/1.41/250 sISO 100

On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.

The style’s f/9.5 on Whole plate gives about the depth of field of f/1.5 on full frame.

Then: 40–65 mm · f/5.6–f/16 · 0.5–10 s · ISO 1–100 on Whole plate, inferred from the gear and the look. Inferred from the processes: a wooden plate camera with a normal to long portrait lens, the sitter held still in daylight; wet collodion (about ISO 1) needed seconds in the 19th century, gelatin plates and film (up to about ISO 100) under a second in the 20th.

Focal length: Roughly the eye’s own perspective; no visible distortion.
Angle: The camera at the height of a standing person or of the subject.
Distance: Whole figures and their immediate surroundings.
Balance: The subject faces the lens; planes run parallel to the picture. The subject in the middle, the frame balanced around it.
Depth: Depth collapsed into pattern and flat shapes.
Duration: An unmoving scene, exposed slowly and carefully.

Step 3

Direct

Rulers and nobles sit full-face on a throne or chair, feet on a footstool and hands on the knees or on a sword hilt, or lean an elbow on a draped table with a hand on a dagger; women sit with the veil drawn over the head and hands in the lap to show bangles and rings. Expressions are grave and the gaze meets the lens.

Body position: On a chair or stool, back straight, hands and feet placed: the formal sitting.
Turn to the camera: Shoulders and hips face the lens straight on: direct, symmetrical, sometimes confrontational.
Head & gaze: Looking straight into the camera, so the subject meets the viewer’s eye.
Arms & hands: Arms by the sides, hands folded in the lap or resting on a chair: quiet and formal. Hands busy with a prop or a tool: flowers, a phone, a cup, a cigarette, an instrument, one’s own work.
Line & energy: Rigid and motionless, sometimes braced against a head rest or gripping a chair: held for a long exposure or a solemn occasion.
Expression: Unsmiling, composed and blank: the face gives nothing away.
With the sitter: The sitter arranged and still, facing the camera.

Step 4

Style the set

Court or festive dress: embroidered coats, jewelled turbans, saris with the veil over the head; pearls, emeralds, bangles, rings, a watch, a sword. A throne or carved chair, footstool, draped table and patterned carpet before a plain backdrop the painter later covers; every jewel placed to be seen.

Clothes: The wearers’ own festive, religious or wedding clothes: saris and lehengas, boubous, robes, kimono. Best clothes, jewellery and accessories put on for the studio or the occasion.
Set & props: A painted, cloth, paper or seamless backdrop behind the subject. Things shown to say who the sitter is or wants to be, their own or lent by the studio: a radio, a bicycle, a watch, books, tools. The stock furniture of a portrait studio, standing in for a setting: a posing chair, a column, a balustrade, a draped table, a potted palm.

Step 5

Finish

Colour: Colour painted onto a monochrome print. Strong, dense colours.
Early processes: Warm-brown prints of the 19th century, made from negatives.
Post-production: Marks made by hand on the negative or the print. Perfected skin and surfaces.
Shown as: Each picture stands on its own.
Shown in: Prints for an album, a card or a frame at home.

Stay away from straight print, black & white, full range, candid & unobserved, snapshot, shallow depth of field, direct on-camera flash, tilted angle, laughing, side-on profile and black shadows.

Before you shoot it

These are likenesses of real, often named people: rulers and their families, courtiers, priests and Jain monks, and women from households that kept purdah, who were rarely photographed and whose names were often not recorded. Some show deities such as Srinathji of Nathdwara and carry devotional meaning. For new work, commission and credit such painters rather than imitating them, and never prompt in their names.

Photographs that define it

From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.

Untitled (Portrait of a Woman in Blue Sari and Veil), by Unknown photographer and painter, India, 1900–2000 — Untitled (Portrait of a Woman in Blue Sari and Veil)

Untitled (Portrait of a Woman in Blue Sari and Veil), India, 20th century. The Cleveland Museum of Art, John Cook Memorial Fund, 2017.10. Source: Untitled (Portrait of a Woman in Blue Sari and Veil) at The Cleveland Museum of Art

Untitled (Portrait of a Woman in Gray Sari and Veil), by Unknown photographer and painter, India, 1900s — Untitled (Portrait of a Woman in Gray Sari and Veil)

Untitled (Portrait of a Woman in Gray Sari and Veil), India, 20th century. The Cleveland Museum of Art, John Cook Memorial Fund, 2017.11. Source: Untitled (Portrait of a Woman in Gray Sari and Veil) at The Cleveland Museum of Art

With other styles

The opposite: Carte-de-visite studio portraits. The carte leaves the whole albumen photograph visible with at most a light tint; here paint is the point, so heighten the regalia in colour and often cover the costume and the ground in opaque paint, keeping only the face photographic.

The opposite: Yokohama photography. Yokohama colourists laid thin transparent washes on staged scenes sold to foreign visitors; Indian painters worked for the sitter's own household and, at court above all, often buried the print in opaque paint, so choose by whether the picture is a souvenir view or a portrait of rank or family.

Pairs with Malian studio portraiture. Both make portraits for the sitter's own family, built from chosen clothes, props and a backdrop; combine Bamako's full figure against patterned cloth with an Indian painter's opaque colour on the costume and jewellery.

The opposite: Hollywood glamour portraiture. Hollywood perfects one face with spotlight and negative retouching to sell allure; the painted photograph perfects it with the brush and spends its effort on regalia and ground, so let rank, not shadow, carry the picture.

Sources

Rajput painting, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajput_painting (citing Beach, Fischer and Goswamy, Masters of Indian Painting, 2011, pp. 755–758: the painted photo-portrait grew from Western tinted photographs; 'careful overpainting in gouache (or even oil) entirely obscures the original print'; Shivalal dominated Mewar court painting from the late 1860s to the early 1890s while his brother Mohanlal took up photography; Ram Singh II of Jaipur as an early photographer)
Portrait of Jaswant Singh II of Jodhpur, Metropolitan Museum of Art loan record: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/76375 (read from the Internet Archive copy of 15 June 2025, as the live page returned 429; 'Photographer unknown, overpainted by Shivalal', ca. 1875, hand-colored albumen print, 26.1 × 22.7 cm; credit line 'Lent by Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation, The City Palace Complex, Udaipur'; inscribed '... Shri Jaswant Singhji's picture made by painter Shivalal'; exhibited in 'Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India, 1100–1900', 26 September 2011–8 January 2012; the label: 'either the entire photograph was overpainted, or more commonly, features were heightened in color'; portrait, regalia, costume and jewellery favoured). Image and the same text on Wikimedia Commons, in the category 'City Palace (Udaipur) - Museum': https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Jaswant_Singh_II_of_Jodhpur_(1873%E2%80%931896).jpg
Portrait of Mohan Lal with His Camera, Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Mohan_Lal_with_His_Camera.jpg (context for the origin, not itself a painted photograph: an albumen print, c. 1875, artist unknown, perhaps Shivalal; City Palace Museum, Udaipur, 2008.01.0104; lent by the Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation to the Met's 'Wonder of the Age', 2011–12; Mohanlal court painter and photographer of Udaipur, shown beside a wooden plate camera on a tall tripod)
Maharana Bhupal Singh, Chhaganlal Gaur, Los Angeles County Museum of Art: https://collections.lacma.org/object/127190 (photographer unknown, overpainted by Chhaganlal Gaur, active 1916–45; c. 1940, opaque watercolour on photograph, cardboard mount, M.2004.192; overpainting of royal portraits ranged from subtle tinting to pigment so heavy it obscured the photograph; colour used sparingly on the face, thick impasto on the jacket; enlarged to an oval; a painted photograph of Bhupal Singh by Gaur made around his accession in 1930 is in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 2004.36.1)
Painted Photographs: Coloured Portraiture in India, ed. Rahaab Allana and Pramod Kumar K.G. (Mapin and the Alkazi Collection of Photography, 2008), sample pages: https://alkazifoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Painted-Photographs-Binder.pdf (studio karkhanas modelled on Mughal and regional painting schools; some studios served royal patrons, others 'the burgeoning and prosperous mercantile and professional classes'; painted backdrops of landscapes, gardens, stallions and boudoirs; bazaar photographers with vivid backdrops; 'a monochromatic ground that ... yields to a layered impasto of colour'; most works from Rajasthan and from studios in Bombay and Calcutta; Pannalal Parasram Gaud; Jujiram Gopilal of Nathdwara; captions for 'Maharani of Nepal', gelatin silver print and watercolour, c. 1900, ACP:2000.14.0076, and 'Jain Monks and Their Attendants', gelatin silver print and watercolour, c. 1920–40, ACP:98.83.0044; women in purdah rarely photographed)
Painted Photographs exhibition, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts: https://alkazifoundation.org/painted-photographs/ (Brunei Gallery, SOAS, 9 July–27 September 2008; works from the 1860s to the 1930s from the princely states of Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Gujarat and studios in Bombay and Calcutta)
Untitled (Portrait of a Woman in Gray Sari and Veil), Cleveland Museum of Art: https://clevelandart.org/art/2017.11 (hand-coloured gelatin silver print, 20th century; a tradition extending back to the mid-1800s; hand-painting cost extra and gave the portrait the status of a luxury object akin to painted portraiture). The open-access API records of 2017.11 and 2017.10 (https://openaccess-api.clevelandart.org/api/artworks/2017.11, https://openaccess-api.clevelandart.org/api/artworks/2017.10) give provenance from Brutal's Gallery, Paris, acquired 2017, and adhesive sale labels on the back with prices; neither names the sitter
Overpainted photograph of Maharaja Mohinder Singh of Patiala enthroned, Wikimedia Commons (ACSAA slide of the Kenneth Robbins Collection): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Overpainted_photograph_of_Maharaja_Mohinder_Singh_of_Patiala_enthroned.jpg (late 19th century; conventions of Indian painting such as a two-dimensional ground; a full-face portrait where miniatures usually showed heads in profile)
Shruti Janardhan, 'The dying art of hand-painting photographs', The Caravan, 1 August 2019: https://caravanmagazine.in/lede/dying-art-hand-painting-photographs (hand-painting arrived in India around the same time as photography, the first painters being court painters; colour photography killed the demand and digital technologies replaced the practice; Jaykumar Shankar, of a family of hand-painters of six generations, works from an office in Delhi's Patel Nagar with transparent photo colours; a photograph of the 1971 war hand-painted by his mother; his collaboration with Vasantha Yogananthan from 2016)
'The painted photographs of Mewar', Outlook Traveller: https://www.outlooktraveller.com/amp/story/explore/insider/the-painted-photographs-of-mewar (earliest Udaipur pieces from 1865 under Maharana Shambhu Singh; paint used to hide the faults of early photographs; about 250 pictures at the palace, some shown in the Fateh Niwas gallery of the City Palace Museum)
Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Reaktion Books, 1997), publisher's page: https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/product/camera-indica-ebook (a 'distinctive post-colonial Indian photographic practice' using over-painting, collage, composite printing and doubling; photographic portraiture in India over the last 150 years)
Wet Collodion and Ambrotype Process (Scully & Osterman), EdinPhoto: https://edinphoto.org.uk/1_early/1_early_photography_-_processes_-_wet_collodion_-_osterman.htm (collodion plates have a rating of about ASA 1, so long exposures are required)
Collodion process, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collodion_process (wet collodion needed only a few seconds to expose an image in daylight; sensitive only to blue and ultraviolet; gelatin dry plates could be made much more sensitive)
Untitled (Portrait of a Woman in Gray Sari and Veil), Cleveland Museum of Art: https://clevelandart.org/art/2017.11 (hand-coloured gelatin silver print, 15 × 10.9 cm; hand painting cost extra and gave the portrait the status of a luxury item)