In the company of Indian masters

Mint

27-04-2025

In 2019, writer and historian William Dalrymple curated a magnificent exhibition titled,
Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company
, at the Wallace Collection in London. It was the first of its kind to be held in the UK, bringing together a rich repository of art collectively known as 'Company paintings". Crucially, the show focused on identifying as many of the artists as possible instead of lumping them all under 'unknown", an orientalist shortcut that had been the default for years, pushing Company paintings into the realm of anthropological curiosity rather than fit subject for aesthetic and art-historical evaluation.
A Treasury of Life: Indian Company Paintings c. 1790-1835
, currently on at Delhi Art Gallery (DAG), builds on Dalrymple's rigorous work by bringing together a wide array of Company paintings. Curated by writer and historian Giles Tillotson, it comes with a lavishly produced catalogue, with contributions by scholars like Apurba Chatterjee Jennifer Howes and Malini Roy, among others.
Apart from juxtaposing works by Indian artists like Sita Ram and Chuni Lal against European originals that may have inspired and informed their style, the show makes a point about the nomenclature of 'Company painting". As Tillotson points out, the term refers to a timeframe—the 18th and 19th centuries—during which these paintings were made under the patronage of East India Company officers. The name is not to be confused as a stylistic category, which may be inferred from the misleading but oft-used term, 'Company school".
Even a cursory look at the paintings makes it evident that the Company painters were invested in leaving their mark, however subtly, on the work they did, usually within a strict framework provided to them by their patrons, many of whom used the images as scientific references to build the Linnaean system of classification of species during this era.
Some of the private collections—the Parlby Album, Zoffany Album or Fraser Album, for instance—served as personal memory-keeping, a record of time spent among the exotic flora and fauna of the empire. Yet others were proofs of the splendour of British life in the faraway colonies. A prominent example of the latter were the images of palaces and bungalows in Maidapur, a now-forgotten interface between 'the Mughal capital of Murshidabad" and 'the British capital of Calcutta", as historian Rosie Llewellyn-Jones puts it. Unlike their European counterparts dominated by the picturesque style of landscape painting, the paintings of British residences in this region are starkly delineated, with clinical precision of architectural blueprints.
The still life paintings by the Murshidabad artists, along with images of caste and religious diversity of India, add freshness to the show. Especially arresting are the paintings from the south, which are not seen as often as the ones from Bengal.
A Treasury of Life is on at DAG, Delhi, till 5 July.