When was ajanta cave paintings discovered

One of the few known surviving paintings to have left Ajanta intact is in the care of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts today. In , Lady Herringham, suffragette and art patron, began further copies with help from the Calcutta School of Art, and from the late s the Indian art historian Ghulam Yazdani made a comprehensive photographic survey of the art of Ajanta, published in four volumes between and Inaccessible and forgotten for half a century, in 81 were uncovered and restored.

Their meticulous restoration raised anew questions asked many times over the past years. How did the artists paint so well, with such precise use of colour, in the dark recesses of these rock-carved prayer halls and monasteries?

Just how many architects, masons, sculptors and painters would have been at work between from circa AD when so much of this glorious place, paid for by merchants and courtiers during the reign of the Vakataka dynasty emperor Harisena, was created? And, in those brief years before the fall of the Vakataka empire and its patronage of Buddhist art, could this really have been a place of quiet contemplation when it must have been one vast building site? In , four replica caves, created by the Mumbai-based designer Rakesh Rathod, were opened at the visitor centre 4km 2.

The idea was to reduce numbers heading to the precious chaityagrihas and viharas. The fake caves, however, have not been a success: evidently, visitors want the real thing even though many clearly revel in the shopping bazaar and food stalls greeting anyone making pilgrimages to Ajanta today. From almost the beginning, scholars working on the site came to the realisation that there were two quite distinct phases of work at Ajanta.

The cave that Smith first walked into, later named cave 10, lay in the centre of the cliff face; it and the five others flanking it were datable by inscription to the first or second century BC.

However most of the Ajanta caves, and almost all the murals, date from nearly years later, during a second phase of construction. This was at the height of India's golden age, when in the Gangetic plain, the fifth-century Gupta dynasty was filling their capital of Kannauj with some of the greatest masterpieces of Indian sculpture, and when Kalidasa was writing his great play, The Cloud-Messenger. From this period date the rich picture cycles of wall painting in caves one and two.

Here among handsome princes and bare-chested nobles, princesses with tiaras of jasmine languish love-lorn on swings and couches, while narrow-waisted dancing girls of extraordinary sensuousness, dressed only in their jewels and girdles, perform beside lotus ponds. Nearby are painted very different images of stark ascetic renunciation — a shaven-headed orange-robed monk lost in meditation, a hermit seeking salvation or a group of wizened devotees straining to hear the words of their teacher.

Dominating everything are portraits of bodhisattvas of otherworldly beauty, elegance and compassion, eyes half-closed, swaying on the threshold of enlightenment, caught in what the great historian of Indian art, Stella Kramrisch, wonderfully described as "a gale of stillness". Such was the celebrity of these fifth-century masterworks that most scholars, and almost all modern accounts of the Ajanta caves, have all but ignored the earlier picture cycles. These paintings were not only more fragmentary, they were also more smoke-blackened than the almost pristine later murals, and perhaps for this reason seemed to invite the attention of early graffiti artists and tourists who wanted to leave a record of their visit.

By the time the Nizam of Hyderabad sent the leading art historian of his state, Ghulam Yazdani, to produce the first photographic survey of the murals in the late s, the murals of caves nine and 10 had already been irreparably damaged.

The Nizam also sent two Italian conservationists to help restore them. Unfortunately their efforts only obscured the murals further: they coated the pigments with a thick layer of unbleached shellac that sat on top of at least two existing Victorian layers of varnish. The shellac attracted grime, dust and bat dung, and quickly oxidised to a dark reddish brown that totally obscured the images from both travellers and scholars.

Less than a century after being rediscovered by a British shooting party in , the figures of caves nine and 10 had been lost again. For the rest of the 20th century they remained effectively hidden, invisible to the naked eye, forgotten by all. Then in , Rajdeo Singh, the Archaeological Survey of India's ASI chief of conservation and head of science at Aurangabad, began work on the restoration of these murals.

Manager Singh, as he is always known, had been in charge of conserving the paintings of Ajanta for a number of years, but the work in caves nine and 10 was, he knew, especially difficult, and of the greatest importance: "The paintings were so fragile that in some places there was a great fear even to touch them with the hand," he wrote later.

Manager Singh's work revealed for the first time since the s the images that are now on open display. Remarkably for so famous a site — Ajanta is one of a handful of world heritage sites in India, attracting 5, visitors a day — their wall paintings have never before been properly photographed.

I stumbled across them on a visit to the caves in March. The ASI does not have much of a tradition of public outreach, and even internally there is perhaps little recognition of what Manager Singh has achieved and uncovered.

For his work is nothing short of a revelation: Singh has uncovered the oldest paintings of Indian faces — with the exception of a few prehistorical pictograms of stick men and animals left by paleolithic hunters in the wilds of Madhya Pradesh. On his head sits a magnificent crown, which at some point was most likely colored in extreme detail, but over time has faded. His eyes are lowered in a meditative state. His calm, spiritual face sets the tone and mood of the room.

In his right hand, he holds a lotus blossom, which may represent his spiritual awakening. If you look up from the beautiful wall paintings you see the geometric designs and motifs that adorn the ceiling.

There are also images of peacocks, subtly decorated in blue paint made from lapis lazuli. One of the panels shows a decorative vegetable motif that looks similar to our modern day green bell pepper.

The elephant is shown playfully galloping, as his trunk swirls close to his body. The painting techniques at Ajanta are similar to European fresco technique. The primary difference is that the layer of plaster was dry when it was painted.

First, a rough plaster of clay, cow dung, and rice husks were pressed on to the rough cave walls. This was then coated with lime paste in order to create a smooth working surface. Sir James Alexander, Scottish military officer and an author, who visited Ajanta in , was the first to publish an account of these astonishing cave paintings.

James Fergusson, the celebrated author of monumental works on Indian architecture, visited the caves during the same year and, in , submitted his paper titled Rock Cut Temples of India to the Royal Asiatic Society.

Fergusson thus succeeded in attracting the attention of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, which appointed Major Robert Gill of the Madras Army to make facsimile copies of all the paintings in the caves. It was a seemingly impossible task but Major Gill seized the challenge with vigour and enthusiasm, so that he could bring them to the attention of the scholarly world. Sadly, they were destroyed without having been photographed, in a fire in The stoic major returned to Ajanta, this time armed with a camera as well as brushes, to start all over again.

But he died there a year later. As the international spotlight stayed firmly on Ajanta, concern for the frescoes grew. Tragically, the interest thus generated also drew a number of visitors to the caves, including treasure hunters who scraped the paintings off the walls. One of the few known surviving paintings to have left Ajanta intact is in the care of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in the US, today.

For ten years, he and his students produced paintings. Of these, he dispatched copies of the paintings to the South Kensington Museum, where they were displayed. Again, 87 of these copies were destroyed in a fire in , but fortunately not before they had been photographed.