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.
As British officials 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. 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.
As British officials 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. 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.
‘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”.
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 wildlife park 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)
Delhi’s market expanded after the
city’s occupation by the British in 1803. Its magnificent 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 groups might depict a range of monuments, festivals, castes,
occupations, or costumes of the subcontinent.
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 colonials.
Among the famous artists of the genre
were Sewak Ram, who worked in Patna,
and members of the Ghulam ‘Ali Khan family of Delhi.
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.
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