Posthumous portrait of Raja Chhatar Singh of Chamba smoking a hookah (c. 1700): Art, History and Details

Posthumous portrait of Raja Chhatar Singh of Chamba smoking a hookah (c. 1700) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Raja Chattar Singh’s reign, from 1664 to 1690, is considered to be a period of prosperity for Chamba. During that time, boundaries of the kingdoms were expanded, and the economy thrived. He is best known for defying the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s orders to demolish all the Hindu temples in his realm. Instead, he installed copper gilt wooden umbrellas on the temples, many of which exist to this day.

Object facts

• Title: Posthumous portrait of Raja Chhatar Singh of Chamba smoking a hookah
• Date: c. 1700
• Culture: Northern India, Pahari kingdoms
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera and ink on paper
• Dimensions: Page: 19.7 x 16.4 cm (7 3/4 x 6 7/16 in.); Image: 15.3 x 12.6 cm (6 x 4 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2018.109

A detail from the museum

The Raja wears a Central Asian robe instead of the popular Mughal jama.

Collection credit

Purchase and partial gift from the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection; Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Griswold, William, Cameron Kitchin, Chase F. Robinson, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, and National Museum of Asian Art (Smithsonian Institution). Pahari Paintings: Art and Stories, edited by Sonya Rhie Mace, Sarang Sharma, and Vijay Sharma. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2026.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.