The Raja's Aviary

Many of the palace complexes of Rajasthan and central India incorporate dedicated aviaries — courtyard pavilions or screened enclosures attached to the zenana or pleasure gardens, often fitted with carved jali screens to admit air and light. Summers' subject is most likely one of these structures rather than a generic invention. The composition would isolate the aviary's silhouette against broad flat fields of colour: the perforated screen rendered as a patterned plane, the surrounding architecture reduced to a few stepped masses, perhaps a glimpse of garden or sky. Internal drawing would be kept to a minimum, with the print's spatial reading carried instead by his soft-edged halations — bleeds of pigment drawn outward from each block's contour by spraying solvent through the back of the sheet during printing. The Raja's Aviary belongs to the Indian cycle of his late career, alongside the Hindu narrative works such as Ravanna's Palace Burning, and reflects the way Summers absorbed South Asian architectural ornament into his own compressed, colour-led idiom. It extends the architectural subjects he had begun a decade earlier with the Nepal pavilion sheets.