By the end of his career, with an active family workshop continuing his style, he was probably not executing the works himself anymore, but leaving them to his children and nephew as his artistic heirs.

Goswamy, the leading scholar of Nainsukh, "Devices and mannerisms associated with Nainsukh include: a preference for uncoloured grounds; shading through a light wash that imparts volume and weight to figures and groups; a fine horizontal line that separates ground from background; a rich green in which his landscapes are usually bathed; a bush with flat circular leaves that he often introduces; a peculiar loop of the long stem of a hooka; and a minor figure often introduced in a two-thirds profile.

Dutta has also made the short documentary films Gita Govinda (2013), Field-Trip (2013), and Scenes from a Sketchbook (2016) which cover different aspects of the painter's work.

At this very time, examples of Moghul painting were increasingly coming to the valleys of the west Himalayas, and it seems probable that Nainsukh came into contact with the works of Mughul painters early on.

It is unknown whether he made this move because of his stylistic innovations or for economic reasons (Guler was probably too small for two painters of the calibre of Manaku and Nainsukh).

His work for Balwant Singh is his most celebrated, showing unusually intimate, informal, and sometimes downright unflattering scenes of the raja going about his daily round of pleasures.

[14] The hill states gained in prosperity from the turmoil to the south after the capture of Delhi by the Persian Nadir Shah in 1739 diverted trade routes their way.

Balwant Singh must have lacked the normal attitude of other Indian royalty to only allow images to be produced that displayed the magnificence of his life; who between patron and painter first suggested this very informal approach is unknown.

[19] The close relationship between Nainsukh and Balwant Singh is also shown by the fact that after his master's early death in 1763, he took his ashes to Haridwar along with his family's possessions, as he recorded in a long entry in the register of the pilgrimage's destination, including a drawing in pen.

He also painted a miniature which probably shows the raja's ashes, ceremonially arranged in a screen tent in the countryside with two attendants, presumably at a resting place while on their way to Haridwar.

For him, Nainsukh produced entirely different kinds of work, turning to the more typical Pahari subject matter of illustrating poems recounting the stories from the great Hindu religious epics.

Some late sheets by Nainsukh that were not taken beyond the stage of preliminary drawings have comments by priests and scholars on the appropriateness of the images and their faithfulness to the texts they illustrate.