Garden & Cosmos

At first the spacey title seems misleading, as these appear to be paintings of Indian courtly life set firmly within the palatial playgrounds of wealthy kings. Beyond the scenes of musical merriment in the maharajahs' zenanas (or harems of women), and away from the lavish ceremonies held around their golden jamas (or thrones), this exhibition opens out to explore aspects of spirituality and landscape that far transcend such earthly ostentatious trappings.

Palace walls give way to the gardens, where we are invited into Krishna's enchanted grove, a fragrant scent of jasmine and frangipane seemingly drifting from each brilliantly delineated petal and leaf. Then we're plunged headlong into a frieze depicting scenes from the Ramayana epic (second only to the Mahabaratha), of elephants fleeing the monsoon and Rama's monkey armies crossing an ocean. Even more spectacular is the torrential river of blood, presided over by a fierce Shiva, and sea of milk, across which a serene Vishnu glides, carried by a many-headed, serpentine servant.

Yet none of these can prepare you for the unadulterated fields of the cosmos, in a series of colour-saturated panels - gold, silver, magenta, orange - across which only one or two figures float divinely, or perhaps hitch a ride on an antelope. These painterly approximations of the Hindu 'Absolute', the eternal essence of the universe, are glorious and unapologetic precursors to all that nervous twentieth-century struggling with abstraction.

Gone too are preconceptions about Indian miniature painting, because these are anything but mini. The artisans of Jodhpur in the heartland of royal Rajasthan worked tirelessly on these almost European-scale pictures from the 1640s to the 1780s, although any similarities with the art of the West end right there, as their multiple, omniscient perspectives of aerial and side views produce much wilder compositions and their detail creates hypnotic and near enlightenment-inducing results.