Shiva Seated on a Throne in a Landscape (c. 1755): Art, History and Details

Shiva Seated on a Throne in a Landscape (c. 1755) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Shiva is depicted sitting on snakes coiled up together on a royal seat. The scene is set in a rocky mountainous setting with a row of trees in the background. In the paintings from Chamba, Shiva is usually depicted with a white complexion in three-quarter view. This formula has remained consistent for over a century with very few exceptions.

Object facts

• Title: Shiva Seated on a Throne in a Landscape
• Date: c. 1755
• Culture: Northern India, Pahari kingdoms
• Type: Painting
• Technique: gum tempera on paper
• Dimensions: Page: 30.2 x 21.9 cm (11 7/8 x 8 5/8 in.); Image: 28.3 x 19.8 cm (11 1/8 x 7 13/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2018.113

A detail from the museum

Shiva is clad in tiger hide wrapped around his waist.

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.