This exhibition features works from KAM’s collection of exquisite paintings predominantly from Rajasthan, northwestern India.Most of these works were produced for Rajput and Mughal royals from the 16th to 19th centuries, whose enthusiastic patronage of the arts led to the flourishing of a daunting range of styles and subjects, including Jain and Hindu devotional narratives and legends, love poems, depictions of court life and musical scenes, landscape, and portraiture.

While local Indian painters had been producing illustrated texts on horizontal palm leaves for Jain and Buddhist patrons from as early as 1000 CE, the introduction of paper making from central Asia in the 13th century freed artists to work in larger, vertical page formats. Though emerging from the art of Mughal manuscript illumination, miniature paintings were not bound or displayed on walls, but were viewed intimately by being passed from hand to hand.

Tactility and movement also informs selected works from Gujarāt, the Punjab Hills, and Orissa which were made for pilgrims or used as visual aids in storytelling. Featuring selections from a range of styles, subjects, and contexts, From Hand to Hand explores the performative dimensions of these evocative visual narratives, and the relations of religious and artistic patronage that made them possible.