Before Goswamy, most historians of Indian art tended to look at their subjects from the point of view of the patron. The great master bronzes of southern India are known after their Pallava and Chola patrons; the most accomplished court miniatures, such as the Padshahnama of Shah Jahan, tend to be seen through the prism of the Mughals who commissioned them. The patronage of individual rulers is the subject of detailed academic studies and exhibitions. But until Goswamy, few scholars had ever attempted to look at the production of Indian art from the point of view of the artists.

There is a reason for this. Very little evidence survives to illuminate the lives of Indian artists. All we have to go on is a series of minute inscriptions, often hidden in the details of paintings, sometimes in a deliberately humble position: The Mughal master Abu’l Hasan — who won the title Nadir al-Zaman, “Wonder of the Times” from Jahangir — deliberately chose to sign his name on the spade used to clear up the dung of his patron’s elephant.

Goswamy worked for nearly five decades to look down the other end of the art historical telescope. Like an Indian avatar of Bernard Berenson excavating in the Tuscan Ducal archives to unearth the bills of exchange between the artists and patrons which would enable him to provide attributions to a host of anonymous canvases, Goswamy has succeeded in reconstructing whole dynasties of previously obscure artists, given them names, and restored their identities and honour.

This is no easy task. Many painters came from the humble carpenter’s caste, who in ancient India ranked alongside lowly musicians and dancing girls. There survives in the Jehangir Album, now in Berlin, a heartbreaking self-portrait of the Mughal master painter, Keshav Das, coming in old age to beg for assistance from his former patron. The old artist shows himself ragged, hollow-chested, bowed and emaciated. In his hands, he holds a petition to the emperor who had once numbered him as among the greatest talents of his court. But even before the old man can present himself, a lathi-wielding attendant advances on him, stick raised, driving him back. In a similar mood, a moving letter found by Goswamy was written by the 18th century painter Shiba asking his patron Raja Sansar Chand of Kangra for permission to return home, “for your humble servant here has fallen on bad days. Your servant has been living on debt, but now no one will give him a loan. He is helpless and goes without food.”

In 1968, Goswamy wrote a ground-breaking article, “Pahari Painting: The Family as the Basis of Style”. Employing a combination of brilliant detective work and intuition, Goswamy managed to marry together the evidence from inscriptions on the back of miniatures with 18th century pilgrim records kept in Haridwar. In this way, he reconstructed the entire family network of arguably the greatest of all Indian painter families — that of Pandit Seu and his great sons, Nainsukh and Manaku, as well as their many artist grandchildren.

He then showed how many members of the family shared a common style, and that their mobility between different patrons effectively made nonsense of the existing system of categorising miniatures by courts and patrons. What was important, Goswamy showed, was not where a particular painting was produced, or who paid the bills, but instead which artist, or family of artists, was holding the brush. Court styles could vary hugely, depending on who was at work; but different families shared common techniques and stylistic idiosyncrasies.

After that Goswamy worked at reconstructing the lives first of the painters of the Punjab hills, and then of those working elsewhere in India. The culmination of his work was the Masters of Indian Painting show 10 years ago, which travelled from Zurich to New York and amounted to a dramatic re-evaluation of the human and biographical reality behind Indian painting. Then followed The Spirit of Indian Painting, a book that was in many ways the summation of Goswamy’s whole career, as he attempted to get inside the heads of those artists to understand what made them paint the way they did, how they came to choose their iconography and what were the daily circumstances of their lives.

What Goswamy achieved was no easy task. As he noted, we are dealing with “a world of silence in which one has to strain very hard to pick up whispers from the past… a layered world that does not reveal all its treasures immediately…. One has to fall back on one’s own resources [to deploy] the patience to piece things together, the willingness to construct a narrative, the imagination to flesh it out…. One needs to make an effort to receive from these paintings all the riches that reside within.”

But if we strain hard, he said, it is still possible to “feel the breath of those times — even if lightly — upon our skin,” and so gain access to the highest state of pure aesthetic pleasure — to experience what Indian aesthetic theory describes as romaharsha, meaning literally, “the hair on my body has become happy”.

Goswamy has now put down his pen forever. But those who read his work will still be able to follow him into the workshops of his painters as they collect their materials — brushes made from a single hair from a calf’s ear or a squirrel’s tail — or as they grind their pigments from Afghan lapis, a particular saffron derived from the flower of the palash tree or the gao-goli yellow, concocted from the urine of cows fed on mango leaves. Goswamy had no equal, but his legacy will live on to guide, instruct and teach those of us who attempt to stumble along in his footsteps.

William Dalrymple is a historian, art historian and curator. The views expressed are personal