Museums usually scheme and sweat to get blockbuster shows. Occasionally blockbusters descend like magic—and magic’s the word for the Seattle Asian Art Museum’s accidental hit, “Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur.” which closed on April 26. If you missed it, orifyou saw it but already miss it, check out these images, but remember that no electronic screen can begin to do justice to the shimmering hues, exquisite hair-thin brushstrokes, and all-embracing sensual and spiritual visions of the Jodhpur court painters and their maharaja masters. Your eyeballs deserve a feast today, and they may never get another one like this: an exhilarating, illuminating journey through the pleasures and splendors of a raj court, the saga of a dynasty from the 16th to 19th centuries, and, oh yeah, the creation of the universe and flowering forth of the gods.{% display:image for:post image:2 align:right height:170 %}

SAAM is one of just four museums worldwide to show these 58 treasures before they return to the current maharaja’s cabinet, where they were only recently discovered. The other three are Indian-art powerhouses: the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery, the British Museum, and the National Museum in Delhi. How did our own Volunteer Park refuge score such a coup? Through luck, personal connection, and the good sense to seize an opportunity.

A staffer at the Sackler, which assembled “Garden and Cosmos,” called to give his old friend Chiyo Ishikawa, the Seattle Art Museum’s deputy director, a heads-up. But the timing was bad, says Ishikawa; the show was coming in less than two years: “We usually plan three years ahead. And we didn’t know if the Asian Art Museum would be undergoing renovation then. But the more he told me—all new scholarship, never seen before—the more intrigued I became. They printed out full-size reproductions of two of the paintings, and I started taking them to every meeting saying, ‘We’ve got to bring these here!’” Her colleagues agreed to do whatever it took to make “Garden and Cosmos” bloom in Seattle.{% display:image for:post image:5 align:right height:170 %}

The result? Press coverage wasn’t lavish, though Seattle Weekly’s Victoria Ellison and The Stranger’s Jen Graves wrote glowing reviews. But word of mouth has raged; a week before closing, "Garden and Cosmos" had drawn 23,000-plus visitors, nearly triple projections and more than any other show since the original Seattle Art Museum became SAM’s Asian adjunct. Show-related programming quickly sold out, as did the catalog; Amazon offered one copy—for $262.76. Eric Scigliano

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