Painting at the Lahore court drew on the Pahari schools of the hill states, particularly Kangra and Guler, whose artists came down to the plains as hill patronage collapsed.
The subjects changed: portraits of Ranjit Singh Ji, of his sardars and of the European officers, court scenes, hunting, and portraits of the Gurus. The style is a Pahari line applied to a Punjabi subject.
European artists at the court, and later photographers, changed it again. August Schoefft painted the Lahore durbar. Emily Eden drew Ranjit Singh Ji from life in 1838.
After 1849 the tradition fragmented. The nineteenth-century Amritsar workshops produced devotional prints, and the twentieth century produced Sobha Singh, whose paintings of the Gurus are the images most Sikhs picture when they think of them, and which are art of the 1930s to 1970s rather than of any earlier period.
A great deal of the court material is in Britain, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Wallace Collection and private hands, and in Lahore. The Chandigarh museum holds part of the Lahore division.
The Sikh court style grew out of the Pahari schools when their patrons failed and their painters came down to Lahore and Amritsar looking for work.
The subjects are the Maharaja and his sardars, the Gurus, and the court's occasions, and the manner is Pahari drawing with Mughal portrait conventions and European touches after the 1830s.
Most of it left. The largest collections are in London and in private hands, and there is no comprehensive published catalogue of Sikh period painting anywhere.