The Paintings are executed primarily in profile with highly elongated eyes within a floral border. There are few landscapes and the scenes are depicted in a foreground closely juxtaposed together. Highly stylised paintings of the Puri temple and scenes from the epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, figure along with the predominant painting of lord Jagannath, a form Krishna, with his older brother Balarama and sister Subhadra.
The Kalighat paintings, created by the Bengal chitrakars during the late 19th and early 20th centuries at the Kali temple near Calcutta, were essentially temple souvenirs for pilgrims. Their swift, black lines, flowing rhythms and abstracted forms later took on more secular themes that attracted the European market and became known as “bazaar paintings”.