Museum · Udaipur, Rajasthan
City Palace Museum, Udaipur
The palace of the Mewar rulers on Lake Pichola, built over nearly four centuries, part of it a museum since 1974. The reason to go is Mewar painting, shown in the rooms it was made for.
See first
- Laxmi Vilas Chowk and its Mewar paintings
- Krishna Vilas: miniatures of royal processions, festivals and games
- Bhim Vilas and its Radha-Krishna paintings
- Mor Chowk and its glass-mosaic reliefs
- The wall paintings of the Jagdish temple's Vishnu and an elephant fight
Maharana Udai Singh II began the palace in the sixteenth century, when he moved his capital from Chittor to the new city of Udaipur on the east bank of Lake Pichola. His successors kept adding to it for close to four hundred years. In 1974 part of it, with the Zenana Mahal, the women’s quarters, was turned into a museum. The complex still belongs to the Mewar family, and trusts maintain it.
What sets it apart is that the paintings are shown inside the palace of the rulers who commissioned them, many of them pictures of that same court. Laxmi Vilas Chowk holds a gallery of Mewar painting. Krishna Vilas has miniatures of the Maharanas’ processions, festivals and games; Bhim Vilas has paintings of Radha and Krishna; another hall shows eighteenth- and nineteenth-century miniatures.
The rooms are part of the art. Mor Chowk, built under Maharana Sajjan Singh, has three reliefs faced with about 5,000 pieces of coloured glass. The Choti Chitrashali, the house of little pictures, dates from the early nineteenth century.
Expect crowds.