Maharao Umed Singh hunting tigers

Royal hunts were symbolically important expressions of kingship within the Ancient Near East, Persia and India. Beginning around 1660, artists in Kota began creating extraordinary images of rulers hunting game, which through to the mid-eighteenth century deployed calligraphic contour lines to render animals with great vivacity in highly textured landscapes. This later hunt scene deploys solid blocks of color - lavender, salmon, orange and teal - that play off the textured sage greens of the forest. The composition demands that the viewer search through the foliage for a tiger represented multiple times in a way that perhaps evokes the act of looking for game in the jungle. On the right, a tiger mauls one of the servants of the hunt. At top center, a nobleman, probably the powerful Zalim Singh, shoots from a a hunting platform at the tiger. The tiger subsequently appears on the left, charging towards Umed Singh, with white halo and dressed in camouflage green, who shoots from a hunting platform. Visible above and below the tiger is the lattice-work enclosure that was built to drive game towards the ruler.
 
The knobby lavender rocks, which appear in other Kota hunt scenes, suggest that the location is the hunting grounds of Kaithun.