Mid 18th to early 20th century · British India: Murshidabad, Calcutta, Patna, Lucknow, Delhi, Banaras, Madras, Tanjore and Trichinopoly
Company painting
Painting by Indian artists for Europeans working for the East India Company and other trading companies. Mughal and Rajput training meets Western watercolour: birds and plants, monuments, festivals and people at work.
How to recognise it
- Watercolour on paper, in the European manner; some Delhi work on ivory
- Sets of trades, castes and costumes, one figure to a sheet
- Life-size studies of birds and plants
- Monuments drawn head-on, like an architect's elevation
- Soft tones and broad modelling, with a miniature painter's detail
Company painting, kampani kalam in Hindi, was made by Indian painters for European patrons. It began in Murshidabad and followed the British to their main centres: Calcutta, Patna, Lucknow, Delhi, Banaras, Madras and the Tamil country. The painters mostly came out of the Mughal and Rajput traditions, and for these patrons they took up European watercolour, perspective and modelling.
Some patrons collected on a large scale. Mary Impey, wife of the judge Elijah Impey, commissioned more than three hundred natural history paintings for what is now called the Impey Album. Lord Wellesley owned over 2,500. Claude Martin in Lucknow commissioned 658 paintings of birds. In Delhi, the family of Ghulam Ali Khan painted the Fraser Album, mostly between 1815 and 1819, which surfaced in William Fraser’s papers only in 1979 and has since been dispersed. In 1844 Sir Thomas Metcalfe commissioned the Delhi Book, 120 paintings, most by Mazhar Ali Khan, showing the last years of the Mughal court and the city’s monuments. It is now in the British Library.
By the 19th century many painters ran shops, and cheaper sheets were copied by rote. Photography dealt it a direct blow, though it lasted into the 20th century. Ishwari Prasad of Patna, who died in 1950, was perhaps the last notable practitioner.
What to look for
Quality varies enormously, from commissioned albums to bazaar copies of the same subjects. Look for drawing done from life, not repeated from a pattern. In the south, Tanjore painters made similar album sets on European paper, without gesso or gold, and these have their own regional character.
