Golden Temple fresco and naqqashi
The painted walls of Harmandir Sahib, where Sikh artists invented a garden of flowers, birds and beasts.
When Ranjit Singh had the upper storeys of Harmandir Sahib covered in gilded copper and marble in the 1830s, the walls inside were decorated with frescoes and with gach, gilded stucco work, by a school of Sikh artists working in Amritsar. Their art is called naqqashi.
The designs are mostly floral: vases overflowing with flowers, creepers, fruit trees, and animals and birds among them, fish, lions and peacocks, arranged in intricate symmetrical panels called dehin. The painters, of whom Bhai Gian Singh Naqqash in the early twentieth century was the most celebrated, drew on Mughal, Pahari and Rajasthani traditions but made a style that is unmistakably their own.
The same craftsmen inlaid the marble floors and lower walls with semi-precious stones in the manner of the Taj Mahal. Much of their work survives, though some was lost in 1984 and in later renovations.
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