Company/ Patna style art
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A backgrounder
Company Painting in Nineteenth-Century India | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
As the British East India Company expanded its purview in South Asia during the late 1700s, great numbers of its employees moved from England to carve out new lives for themselves in India. As they traveled through the country and encountered unusual flora and fauna, stunning ancient monuments, and exotic new people, they wanted to capture these images to send or take home. Whereas the modern tourist would rely on his camera for such a task, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers had to hire Indian painters to do the job. The works produced by these artists, undertaken in a European style and palette, are known collectively as “Company” paintings. They are characterized in medium by the use of watercolors (instead of gouache), and in technique by the appearance of linear perspective and shading. Aesthetically, they are the descendants of the picturesque scenes of India created by the likes of Thomas and William Daniell.
This style of painting arose in a number of different cities. Work from each region is distinguishable by style, which grew out of and was heavily influenced by earlier local traditions. Calcutta was among the important early production centers, as the site of one of the oldest British trade houses. The city’s most enthusiastic patrons were Lord Impey, chief justice of the High Court from 1777 to 1783, and the Marquess Wellesley, who served as governor-general from 1798 to 1805. Both had collected large menageries and hired artists to paint each of the birds and animals in them. A Company-established botanical garden in Calcutta then undertook a similar project for the samples of plant life it had collected. Other influential painting centers were in Varanasi, a major Hindu pilgrimage site that drew many tourists (who knew it as Benares), and Madras, where Lord and Lady Clive were stationed from 1798 to 1804. Delhi’s market expanded after the city’s occupation by the British in 1803. Its magnificent Mughal monuments were the most popular subjects, and its artists were unique in using ivory as a base for painting. Other common subjects from this time were the residences, servants, carriages, horses, and other possessions that Company employees had amassed; Lady Impey was the patron of a number of such scenes.
While in the early phases of this school artists depended on a few key patrons, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, enterprising Indian artists had begun to create sets of standard popular subjects that could be sold to any tourist passing through the major attractions. Such sets might depict a range of monuments, festivals, castes, occupations, or costumes of the subcontinent.
Among the famous artists of the genre were Sewak Ram, who worked in Patna, and members of the Ghulam ‘Ali Khan family of Delhi. Patna was one of the major centers of Company painting because it was home to both an important factory and a Provincial Committee, and thus to many British expatriates. Ram seems to have moved there in the 1790s to find work; by the 1820s, his large-scale paintings of festivals and ceremonies were being collected by the likes of Lord Minto and Lord Amherst, both governors-general. When brothers William and James Fraser were sent by the Company in 1815–16 to tour newly conquered lands in the north of the country, they took artists from Delhi with them. It was probably at this time that Ghulam ‘Ali Khan made contact with them, but his known works date to after the Frasers’ return to Delhi in the 1820s. Khan is particularly noted for his scenes of village life; other members of the family were especially skilled at portraiture. Such a style of painting did not develop throughout the country; other cities did not have the monuments to attract British tourists or, as in the case of Rajasthan, Hyderabad, and the Punjab Hills, were home to important local patrons. The school lost its momentum as photography was introduced to India in the early 1840s.
Details
The collections from South and South-East Asia comprise nearly 60,000 objects, including about 10,000 textiles and 6,000 paintings covering the Indian subcontinent south of the Himalayas, including India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. The range of the collection is immense.
The greatest strengths of the collection are in Mughal miniature paintings and decorative arts, especially jades and rock crystal; Indian textiles, including those made for the European and South-East Asian markets; Indian sculpture, especially bronzes; Indian furniture for the Western market; paintings from the Punjab Hill courts; 19th century photographs of India and Burmese decorative arts. Other substantial holdings include jewellery, ceramics, glass, lacquerware, basketry and woodwork from throughout South and South-East Asia and the Himalayas, Tibetan 'tangkas', and Indian film posters and ephemera. The collection of contemporary art from India and Pakistan includes significant works by several major artists.
A
Company Period - National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi
Paintings of Company School
The eighteenth and nineteenth century India witnessed a new genre of painting popularly known as ‘Company School’. It was so named because it emerged primarily under the patronage of the British East India Company. The officials of the Company were interested in paintings that could capture the “picturesque” and the “exotic” aspect of the land, besides recording the variety in the Indian way of life which they encountered. Indian artists of that time, with declining traditional patronage, fulfilled the growing demand for paintings of flora and fauna, landscapes, historical monuments, durbar scenes, images of native rulers, trades and occupations, festivals, ceremonies, dance, music as well as portraits.
The Company School paintings display an amalgam of naturalistic representation and the lingering nostalgia for the intimacy and stylization of medieval Indian miniatures. It is this intermingling that makes the Company school so unique even though the paintings neither had the accuracy of the photograph nor the freedom of the miniatures. The artists of this School modified their technique to cater to the British taste for academic realism which required the incorporation of Western academic principles of art such as a close representation of visual reality, perspective, volume and shading. The artists also changed their medium and now began to paint with watercolour (instead of gouache) and also used pencil or sepia wash on European paper.
‘Company Paintings’ were first produced in Madras Presidency in South India. This new style of painting soon disseminated to other parts of India such as Calcutta, Murshidabad, Patna, Benares, Lucknow, Agra, Delhi Punjab and centres in Western India. The introduction of photography in 1840, however, brought about a new dimension to painting. Now the emphasis came on producing works which could capture “objective reality”.
Resurgence of interest
2020
Sonam Joshi, January 13, 2020: The Times of India
From: Sonam Joshi, January 13, 2020: The Times of India
A group of 10 merchants from Kabul and Iran sit outside a tent, with a young boy holding a weighing scale to measure walnuts and other dry fruits. A white cat sleeps next to them, possibly to deter rodents, while a camel peeps out from behind the tent.
Evoking the familiar figure of the kabuliwala, this vivid 1825 watercolour painting by Ghulam Ali Khan is part of a new exhibition of Company-style paintings titled ‘In Good Company’ at the auction house Bonhams in London. It is curated by the founder of the Instagram account @artsofhindostan who wants to remain anonymous.
The exhibition, which draws from a private collection built over three decades, comprises 15 individual watercolour paintings and two albums made between the 1780s and 1850s. Created by Indian artists employed largely by the English East India Company and its officials, these came to be known as Company paintings or Kampani Kalam. With the invention of photography, the genre gradually declined after the 1850s.
So did its importance in the art world. "Company Painting was neglected to an extent because it was a hybrid style, not seen as having the same level of genius as Mughal and Rajput paintings because those were a purely indigenous form and this had European influences," says the curator. "But art is meant to be syncretic, not a political statement."
But lately there seems to be a resurgence of interest in the style, with another exhibition titled ‘Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting For the East India Company’, curated by historian William Dalrymple opening in London in December. In an article for The Spectator, Dalrymple pointed out that there had never been a museum show of Company art in the UK for political rather than aesthetic reasons. "Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the art of Empire came to be regarded in Britain with a profound distaste. Most paintings with imperial themes were simply taken off the walls and put into storage. Disowned by subsequent history, the art commissioned by the Company has effectively been orphaned and ignored."
One of the artists who features in both shows is Ghulam Ali Khan, who was originally employed by Mughal emperors Akbar Shah II and Bahadur Shah II and then worked for several East India Company figures. One of his other paintings at Bonhams is a view of the Diwan-i-Khas at the Red Fort in Delhi which shows features such as the marble balustrade and the gilt copper domes that were removed after the Revolt of 1857. The painting was once owned by Jacqueline Kennedy and is said to have inspired her look in her 1962 trip to India as First Lady.
Besides Delhi, notable artists emerged in Calcutta, Patna, Lucknow and Madras, who learnt the use of perspective, watercolour and softer palettes from visiting European artists and evolved a new hybrid style of their own. For instance, one of the albums features 50 botanical studies of flowers and fruits such as mangoes, frangipani, and lillies. Painted with photo-realism by an artist named Sita Ram, it marks a departure from the flat representation of the same subject by Mughal and Rajput painters using gouache. “Some of the pieces were commissioned for official and scientific purposes, but for many Europeans they formed a pictorial record which they could take back home to remind them of their lives in India,” says Olive White, head of Islamic and Indian Art at Bonhams.
For instance, the second album of ‘South Indian Portraits’ depicted the uniforms of the Indian sepoys of the Madras Army and other textiles, jewellery and costumes. It was commissioned by an East India Company official George Gordon and painted by the Vellore artist Yellapa. The exhibition also includes several paintings of birds such as the red-headed marlin commissioned in Lucknow by Major General Claude Martin, an East India Company official who founded the La Martiniere schools, and had a deep interest in local flora and fauna.
