Maratha court portraits: how Shivaji, the Peshwas and the Thanjavur rajas were painted

This page looks at how the Maratha rulers were portrayed, in three places and over two centuries. It starts with the likenesses of Shivaji that painters in Golconda sold to European traders, moves to the court of the Peshwas at Pune, where a British painter and an Indian painter worked side by side, and ends at Thanjavur in the far south, where Maratha rajas ruled into the 1800s. For the history of Shivaji and the Maratha Empire itself, read Shivaji and the Maratha kings. For how these portraits fit among India's other royal courts, start at the Indian court painting guide.

Shivaji in the portrait sets of Golconda

Portraits of Shivaji made in his own century survive from Golconda, one of the Deccan sultanates. The art historian Marta Becherini, of Columbia University, has studied sets of royal portraits that painters in Golconda sold to Dutch and other European traders during the reign of the last Golconda sultan, Abul Hasan Qutb Shah, from 1672 to 1687.

These sets follow a fixed order: Mughal emperors and princes first, then Mughal officials, then the Golconda and Bijapur royal families, and last the kings of Persia. Becherini writes that some sets add Shivaji, the only Maratha in them, and that Shivaji, who died in 1680, is prominently represented in the surviving sets. She links this to trade: his talks with Dutch officials helped the Dutch company against the other European companies in the region.

The figures in these sets mostly stand, with the face in profile or turned partway to the viewer. Each one is set against a single colour, with a thin row of clouds at the top and grass at the bottom. Becherini shows that the painters traced their figures from older portraits, so one likeness could appear in several sets. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam holds one of these Shivaji portraits, dated to around 1675 to 1685. It shows him to the hips with a sword in his right hand and a lance in his armoured left hand.

For the Golconda painters and the sultans they painted first, see our page on Deccan court portraits.

The Peshwa court at Pune

In the 1700s the Peshwas held court at Pune. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London says the Peshwa palace there, which it calls the Shanwar Palace, was built by Peshwa Baji Rao in 1736, and that fire destroyed most of it in 1827 and 1828. The V&A holds a watercolour of one of its gateways painted in 1850 by the British artist William Carpenter, with a vegetable market in the square in front.

A British painter at the Peshwa's court

The Yale Center for British Art, a museum at Yale University, tells how European portrait painting reached the Peshwa court. Charles Warre Malet was the East India Company's Resident at Pune, its official representative at the Maratha court, from 1785 to 1798. In 1790 he arranged a treaty between the Peshwa and the British against Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore. The painter James Wales had arrived in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1791. In June 1792 Malet called him to Pune "by desire of the [Maratha] Court", and by July Wales had arrived with his assistant, Robert Mabon, to paint portraits of the Marathas.

The Royal Asiatic Society in London owns one result. Madhu Rao Narayan, the Maratha Peshwa, with Nana Fadnavis and attendants is an oil painting of 1792, 228 by 190 centimetres. The society says the Peshwa commissioned it shortly after Wales arrived in Pune in July 1792. Yale adds that Mabon made detailed sketches for Wales's portraits of the Marathas.

The treaty painting

By October 1792, Wales had begun a large painting for Malet that he called the "Great Treaty Durbar Group". Yale calls it a monumental, nine-foot painting. It shows the court in the Ganapati Hall of the Peshwa's palace. Malet offers the treaty to the young Peshwa Madhu Rao Narayan, who lived from 1774 to 1795 and sits on a low throne next to his adviser Nana Fadnavis. Yale calls Nana Fadnavis the power behind the Peshwa's rule.

Wales died in 1795 with the painting unfinished. Malet asked the British painter Thomas Daniell to complete it, and it was shown at the Royal Academy in London in 1805. Yale quotes Edward Moor, a Company officer, who praised the picture in 1810 but wrote that Daniell had added more "mythological ornaments than are actually in the room". Yale explains that Daniell was working from Wales's unfinished painting and Mabon's sketches of an event 15 years earlier.

An Indian painter at the same court

Yale also records an Indian artist who worked beside Wales. Gangaram Chintaman Tambat was a painter and sculptor whom Malet employed in the 1790s to draw the life, buildings and landscape of Pune and the land around it. He was probably trained in Pune's local tradition, and he learned European methods of perspective and the camera obscura, a box that projects a view onto paper for tracing, from Malet and Wales. He drew the cave temples at Ellora and made small sculptures of animals, possibly from the Peshwa's own collection of animals.

The Maratha rajas of Thanjavur

Rulers from the Maratha royal clan held Thanjavur, in today's Tamil Nadu, far to the south of Pune. Three of the V&A's Thanjavur portraits on this page are what the museum calls Company paintings: pictures made by Indian artists for the British in India.

A raja on a white horse

The V&A's portrait of Raja Tulsaji of Tanjore, another name for Thanjavur, painted around 1770, is 75.5 by 55.5 centimetres. The raja wears a gold robe and a turban and holds a rose in his right hand. He rides a white horse in rich trappings while his escort marches around him.

Two rulers in one procession

Around 1797 a Thanjavur artist painted a procession 125 centimetres wide, now at the V&A. It shows Amar Singh, who ruled Thanjavur until 1798, and Sarabhoji, whom LACMA also calls Serfoji II. White bullocks pull their carriages, with elephants, horses, soldiers and attendants around them. The V&A reads the scene by the size of the carriages: Amar Singh rides in the larger gilded one, so the museum dates the painting before 1798, when the British pensioned him off and recognised Sarabhoji as ruler.

A painting renamed

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) shows how a portrait can be misread. LACMA says Serfoji II, also called Sarabhoji II Bhonsle, was born in 1777 and adopted in 1787 by King Tulajaji II. The British installed him as king in 1798, with his power limited to the Thanjavur fort and the land around it, and he reigned until his death in 1832.

When LACMA acquired a procession painting of around 1800 to 1810 in 1990, the ruler on the elephant was named as Amar Singh. The museum now names him as Serfoji II. The reason is an English official seated in the carriage directly behind the ruler. Amar Singh had resisted the British, so LACMA thinks the pair are more likely Serfoji II and one of two British officials, the District Collector Charles Harris or the Resident William Blackburne. The museum adds that grand processions were a fashionable show of royal splendour in Thanjavur, above all during the Dussehra festival in September or October.

Serfoji II in glass and marble

Serfoji II was painted on glass as well as paper. The V&A holds a head and shoulders portrait of him, painted by a local artist on glass around 1860, long after his death. He holds a flower. The V&A says the flower is a common feature of portraits of Indian rulers and stands for a sensitive and cultured nature. Another V&A painting, of an unnamed ruler from Tanjore or Madras made between 1780 and 1800, shows the same gesture: a short brocade coat, a long muslin robe and a flower in the hand.

The glass portrait is 20 by 15 centimetres, in gouache, a thick watercolour, with gold leaf. The V&A says Chinese artists seem to have brought glass painting to India in the late 18th century. Glass paintings broke easily, so the British seldom brought them home, and the V&A holds only eight.

Serfoji II also stands in marble. The V&A holds a photograph by Linnaeus Tripe, official photographer to the Madras government, taken in 1858 and published in 1860 under the title "Sivaji's Statue". It shows a white marble statue of Serfoji in the quadrangle of the Thanjavur palace, ordered by his son, Raja Sivaji of Thanjavur, the next ruler, who lived more than a century after the Maratha founder Shivaji. The V&A names the sculptor as John Flaxman, while the text printed with the photograph in 1860 names Chantrey. That text says the raja stands in an attitude of adoration, a pose of worship, looking toward the great temple in the fort, on a stone where the old Nayakar kings once sat to give justice.

A Maratha chief at Gwalior

The V&A calls Daulat Rao Sindhia of Gwalior a Maratha chief, the great-nephew and adopted son of Madhoji Sindhia, and holds a painting of him made around 1825 by Khairullah of Delhi. He sits on green and gold cushions under a canopy, dressed in yellow, with courtiers and attendants around him. The museum says he took power in March 1794, lost to the British at Assaye in 1803 and reigned for 33 years.

Artists also painted Maratha princes on small surfaces: the V&A holds a 19th century portrait of a Maratha prince painted on an oval plaque of conch shell.

How to read a Maratha royal portrait

For the older kings of Thanjavur and their temples, see our page on Chola royal portraits. Tipu Sultan, the enemy in the Pune treaty, appears in our page on Mysore court portraits.

The Maratha King style

Maratha King is one of the 15 portrait styles on Purrealism. The studio examples in the gallery show it on a German Shepherd, a Pomeranian, a Shih Tzu and a Persian cat. If you like the upright, formal pose of the Golconda portraits of Shivaji, choose a photo where your pet sits or stands straight, with the head and chest clear and in focus. The portrait studio takes one photo of up to 5 MB.