Art is in the details. And if Pune-based historian Dr Uday S Kulkarni is to be believed, the only painter to have managed to capture the minutiae of everyday life, while memorialising the richness of the Marathas in the late 1700s was Scottish artist James Wales. Until then, there were the stray profile portraits of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and Peshwa Baji Rao that would eventually make their way to the museums of the world. But, it's Wales's "glorious technicolour" painting of Sawai Madhavrao (also known as Madhav Rao II), Peshwa of the Maratha Empire in India, "with its surrounding props and characters that made his subject life-like". "It almost looked better than a photograph," says 63-year-old Kulkarni.

It's this uniqueness of Wales's artistry, which first piqued Kulkarni's curiosity. His previous works, Solstice at Panipat and The Era of Baji Rao, engaged with 18th century Indian history. His new historical biography, James Wales: Artist and Antiquarian in the time of Peshwa Sawai Madhavrao (Mula Mutha Publishers), is no different.