Realistic but static forms set against a clear background; rigid, insentient human figures; detailed, diagrammatic architecture; natural-history specimens meticulously rendered: these are some of the distinguishing features of Company painting. A stylistically distinct form of art produced by Indian artists, primarily for East India Company employees, it marks the transition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from an indigenous Indian painting to a unique, hybrid Indo-European style.
However, this was not the earliest instance of European influence on Indian art. The imperial artists of the Mughal court had encountered Western paintings even before the first official Jesuit mission of 1580. The emperors Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan took a lively interest in European pictures, and themes from classical mythology and the Bible were skilfully copied by Mughal artists. Technical elements from Western art such as perspective and chiaroscuro were adopted, with varying degrees of success, by the court painters, but they were also quite content to combine features from the Islamic and European traditions within a single painting. The Indian regional schools of art, in contrast, stuck more rigidly to their own artistic conventions.
The expansion of Company rule in the eighteenth century was paralleled by the need for a greater knowledge and understanding of India, and large amounts of data were collected, categorised and rationalised to facilitate this process. The appropriation of such knowledge took many forms, from the translation of texts in the multifarious Indian languages, to a study of Hindu law and religion, through to extensive surveys of the people of India, the land, agriculture, geography, archaeology and architecture. This body of knowledge also included visual representations and it was here that Company paintings played an important role.
The commissioning of paintings in this style was a result of the perceived lack of Western ideals in traditional Indian painting. Indian miniatures, while intricately detailed and colourful, were primarily illustrations of courtly life and of myths and legends. What the newly arrived British middle-classes wanted were records of their own lives in India along with those of the people, places and events that surrounded them. They also wanted paintings depicted in a manner that they could appreciate. For many of them, trained in the art of watercolour, miniature painting lacked the qualities they admired and valued, such as realism, a Western-style perspective, a sense of proportion and the use of light and shade.
For their part, Indian artists welcomed British patronage at a time when they were losing their traditional sources of income as a result of both the decline of the Mughal court and the changing tastes of Indian patrons in favour of work by visiting European artists. Although the French also encouraged Company artists in the Punjab and in settlements like Pondicherry, it was the British, the dominant colonial power, who provided the largest market and many artists migrated to areas with a large British population in search of work. Company painting thus developed across the whole of India, from Madurai in the south to Calcutta in the east and Delhi in the north, and even on a smaller scale in neighbouring countries, such as British-controlled Burma, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Through a combination of observing European artists at work, studying available Western prints and following speciï¬Âc instructions by the patrons themselves, these artists learnt about European taste and techniques. They exchanged gouache for watercolours and European paper, and they adapted their style of painting to meet the demands of their new employers, replacing the bright colours of traditional Indian painting with the muted tones that appealed to Europeans. The outcome was a new genre of painting, the hybrid kampani kalam, or Company style, which presented a visual record of India in European terms. The paintings depicted the architecture, ethnography, topography and natural history of India, of which two typical examples are illustrated here. The ï¬Ârst shows three couples and the tools of their trade. The inscriptions inform the viewer that these are a 'Potmaker Malabar cast' [sic], a 'Barber Gentoo [i.e. Hindu] cast' and a 'Washerman Gentoo cast'. Painted in Thanjavur, South India, in the 1830s, this is one folio from a volume containing thirty paintings depicting different castes, occupations, methods of cultivation and processional scenes. By reducing the subjects to their deï¬Âning characteristics, these paintings served to represent not individuals but native types. By isolating the figures against a clear white background and removing all sense of time and place, the images were effectively decontextualised, a process which led to the creation of a visual index of the people of India.
The British were equally keen to document the architecture of India, and when surveyors were sent to record these monuments they took Indian artists with them.
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The rendering of architecture was unlike either Indian miniature painting or the 'sublime and picturesque' of British landscape painting of that period. Stylistic influence has been attributed to the British engineer draughtsmen, who arrived in Delhi in around 1803. Buildings were shown in front elevation, against a plain ground. Unlike the high viewpoint used in miniature painting, the most distinctive feature of these architectural drawings was the use of a Western-style perspective. Many of the images show evidence that they were produced by artists unfamiliar with and unpractised in this convention. In this example, the building is accurately drawn but there are elements of inconsistency in the perspective across the painting. The artist often includes details that would not normally be visible from the central viewpoint. Similarly, the attention to detail in the brickwork and screens is indicative of the draughtsman's Indian heritage.
As with most Company paintings, the artists who produced these two illustrations remain unknown. George Forster, a Company civil servant, noted in 1798 that they were mostly regarded as mere copyists: 'The Hindoos of this day have a slender knowledge of the rules of proportion, and none of perspective. They are just imitators, and correct workmen; but they possess merely the glimmerings of genius.' [1] After 1825 the demand for these paintings was such that many of them were reduced to stock images and were virtually mass-produced. There were exceptions, however, and talented artists continued to paint in a variety of individual styles. We know the names of a number of the more distinguished artists and their patrons. Shaikh Muhammad Amir of Calcutta, for example, specialised in depicting the houses and staff of British residents in a particularly Europeanised style, while Shiva Lal and Shiva Dayal Lal, who ran flourishing shops selling their work, were prominent representatives of the Patna School of Company painting. Eminent patrons included the Chief Justice of Bengal, Sir Elijah Impey, and his wife, who were especially interested in natural history. They formed a private menagerie in Calcutta and commissioned over three hundred paintings of Indian wildlife from Company artists, some of them in a style anticipating the naturalistic bird illustrations of later Western artists such as John Audubon. Other well-known patrons were Marquis Wellesley, who commissioned over 2,500 natural-history paintings; Sir Charles D'Oyly, an amateur artist himself, who had a great influence on the local painters of Patna; and James and William Fraser, who encouraged the versatile artists of Delhi to make some of the finest Company portraits known.
The invention of photography and its arrival in India in the 1840s led to the mechanisation of the process of both illustrating native types and documenting architecture. Photography was soon employed as the most scientific and therefore appropriate medium with which to conduct extensive surveys of India for official purposes. However, Company painting survived both the development of photography and the demise of the East India Company in 1858. The various nineteenth-century art schools set up in major Indian cities encouraged young Indian artists to adopt a Western style, which is reflected in the continued development of Company painting; many practitioners based their work on direct copies of Victorian photographs and lithographs.
One of the last Company artists of distinction was Ishwari Prasad of Patna, who taught at the Calcutta School of Art, where in the early 1900s the status of his style, compared with that of modernists, such as Abanindranath Tagore, was considered inferior and was reflected in his relatively low monthly pay. In the 1930s and 1940s, Dr W.G. Archer bought from Ishwari Prasad's stock of paintings and obtained much information about the world of the Company artist that would otherwise have been lost. He and his wife, Dr Mildred Archer, subsequently built up the V&A's collection of Company paintings, making it among the largest in the world. The demise of Company painting was slow but inevitable and, with the death in 1950 of Ishwari Prasad, a unique chapter in Indian art history came to a close.
[1] George Forster, A Journey from Bengal to England, 1798, vol. I, p. 80.
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Company Drawings. 2000
