Life in Lady Impey's menagerie—in Calcutta, around 1780—must have been a riot, if the portraits of its denizens made by Shaikh Zain ud-Din and his colleagues are as true to life as they seem. The cheetah looks a companionable type, more likely to regale the sambar deer with a hunting story than to gobble her; and the pangolin and the Malabar squirrel also appear to have tales to tell. Even the fish have personality. This is a consistent quality in the best of so-called ‘Company’ painting—meaning works made by Indian artists for European patrons in the period of Company rule. Running through every attempt to record examples or types, is an attention to particular character. The same spirit—poised equally between the scientific and the affective—pervades Haludar's drawing of a gibbon, of around 1800, and Shaikh Muhammad Amir of Karraya's depictions of dogs and horses in the 1840s. It even extends to people, such as the villagers, including those being recruited to join Skinner's Horse, as portrayed by the artist of the Fraser album around 1815. They are as thoroughly and convincingly individualised as any portraits can be.
It is indeed the best of Company painting that is offered in this book, and in the exhibition of 109 works held at the Wallace Collection in London (December 2019—April 2020) for which it is the catalogue. Edited by William Dalrymple, the book makes a leap forward in the study of Company painting, by bringing together under one cover the recent work of leading experts in various aspects of the field.
Rosie Llewellyn-Jones gives us a brief account of the creative world generated in Lucknow by Claude Martin, Antoine-Louis Polier and Jean-Baptiste Gentil, involving artists such as Mihr Chand and Navasi Lal. She pays special attention to images of Indian flora commissioned by Martin and now in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Andrew Topsfield summarises the current state of knowledge regarding the widely dispersed Impey album, with a focus on Zain ud-Din but also covering Bhawani Das and Ram Das. Henry Noltie has devoted years to untangling the muddles surrounding botanical works that came out of Calcutta—often made by curators who re-arranged works by species rather than by provenance or artist. He updates us on this project, steps back to reflect on the terms used to discuss such works, but leaves time to bring forward individual artists such as Manu Lall and Chuni Lall.
Haludar was a Bengali natural history painter who worked for the East India Company surgeon Francis Buchanan Hamilton. Including a number of clearly annotated drawings in the British Library, Haludar's work was known but little explored; Malini Roy gives us the fullest account of it to date. Lucian Harris pulls out a plum: his chapter covers both the best known of the later Company painters, Muhammad Amir of Karraya, and the latest entrant, Yellapah of Vellore, whose work was first securely identified as recently as 2013. These are artists of extraordinary dexterity and sensitivity. The exclusion of any depiction of the European patrons from Muhammad Amir's paintings has been remarked on before. Harris is inclined to read it not as a sign of respect but as an act of subversion: an implicit mockery of the very materialism that he faithfully depicts. While exercising caution on the point, he makes the case well that both these artists’ vision and intelligence demand interpretations that are less literal than they have received before.
Yuthika Sharma continues her project to examine the role of Ghulam Ali Khan in generating a Delhi School—with a special interest in the depiction of architecture—in early nineteenth-century Delhi. She also develops the suggestion that the same artist was directly involved in the production of the Fraser album, exploring more fully here the common link between Ghulam Ali Khan and James and William Fraser, via James Skinner—who was both a friend of the brothers and a patron of the artist. If she can confirm it, she will have solved a major mystery in the field. Jerry Losty has written extensively elsewhere about the Bengali artist Sita Ram, whose work for the Marquess of Hastings first came to light in 1974. Here he succinctly summarises the remarkable range of Sita Ram's styles.
William Dalrymple, as editor, draws all these contributions together in an eloquent introduction, which sparkles with characteristic observations. Distinguishing Enlightenment scientific objectivity from a Mughal “tradition of feeling” in natural history images, he remarks of an adjutant stork painted in Lucknow: “we know this bird, who looks at us with all the sagacious poise of an elderly courtier or the wisdom of some unusually prescient Sufi mystic about to issue some dire premonition” (pp. 11, 59).
Rich in detail, the book nevertheless raises more questions than it answers in its framing of the subject. To begin with, the editor and some contributors object to the very term ‘Company’ painting on two grounds: that it places undue emphasis on the patrons rather than the artists; and that the material is stylistically too varied to be considered a single, coherent phenomenon (pp. 12–14, 78, 147). The desire to shift attention to the artists is commendable, but while the names of some are known or have come to light recently, a great many works remain anonymous (including a third of those in this catalogue), and the question of who commissioned them remains interesting. Ideally we want to know both. And with respect to the second objection, Mildred Archer, who first adapted the term (from Urdu), never intended it as a stylistic category. As she catalogued the collections in the British Library (formerly the India Office Library, in 1972) and the V&A Museum (in 1992) she knew better than anyone how varied Company painting is, and she did not present it as a style. These authors are chastising the term for failing in a task it was never meant to serve. Most Indian painting that survives from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was produced at a court—not just those in Delhi and Lucknow, but courts all over India from the Himalayas to Thanjavur. No one has any difficulty with the stylistic diversity included under the umbrella term ‘court painting’. The distinguishing term ‘Company painting’ was coined, quite simply, to refer to painting of the same period that was produced not at a court but for someone associated with the East India Company.
Despite the objections, no alternative is proposed. And if we are going to re-think the category then we should examine it as a whole, not in part. For the selection offered here is indeed highly partial, focusing on technically accomplished works produced in metropolitan centres like Calcutta, Lucknow and Delhi. There is no mention of the Patna artist Sewak Ram, to say nothing of the mass-produced ‘Trades albums’ of the mid-nineteenth century. There are acknowledgements to the exhibition Room for Wonder, curated by Stuart Cary Welch at the American Federation of Arts in 1978. That gave a much broader view of Company painting. Mildred Archer too was interested in the whole spectrum, perhaps because she saw the connections with popular bazaar art (another field of her interest), or perhaps because her early experience of Bihar left her with a more Patna-centred than Calcutta-centred view of India. Much of what she wrote about is treated to an Olympian oversight here. Well, it is fair enough to focus on the elite end of production when the aim is to establish the claim that Company painting includes ‘Masters’, as much as any other phase of Indian art. But wilfully overlooking half of the subject will limit your ability to challenge the terms.
The selection of exhibits and illustrations also does not fully reflect the Indian artists’ engagement with European art that lies at the heart of this story, as the text reveals. It is not just a matter of the use of English-made paper and pigments, or artists being shown Western books on botany. There are specific dialogues at play. For example, Harris points to Muhammad Amir's debt to the Belgian artist Balthazar Solvyns (p. 123); Sharma has unearthed still confusing connections between Ghulam Ali Khan and the Daniells (p. 141); and Losty discusses Sita Ram's response to aquatints by Hodges (pp. 174, 181). But none of this is shown. No European work is included. A recent survey of British art in India included among its 240 illustrations all of two works by Indian artists (reviewed JRAS 17/1). Here we have the counterpart. We all accept, it appears, that there was an exceptionally creative interaction between Indian and European art; but this is a story that for some reason has to be envisioned in discrete spaces. Why?
The final piece of doubtful framing involves Dalrymple's comment that the works included here “represent the last phase of Indian artistic genius before the twin assaults of photography and the influence of western colonial art schools ended an unbroken tradition of painting going back two thousand years” (p. 12). Even leaving aside the dubious claim of an “unbroken tradition” of such duration, this is problematic on more than one level. As Dalrymple himself—here and elsewhere has pointed out, Indian artists have always profitably been caught in cultural “crosswinds” (p. 14). In the late nineteenth century, they responded to photography and to the art schools, just as they had to other forces in the past. The results might not be to everyone's personal taste but their existence is undeniable. Why are these new forces “assaults”, when earlier ones were ventilation? And why be so quick to announce the demise of Indian painting? There is a long-standing habit among writers on Indian art to regard it as finished—terminated either by Islamic or by Western influence. This is not a model worth perpetuating. A visit to the annual India Art Fair will reveal to an eye as observant as Dalrymple's that Indian painting today is even more than previously open to international currents—and why should it not be?—but it has decidedly not ended.
There are many memorable images in Forgotten Masters. One that stands out is the often exhibited and published view of ‘Lady Impey Supervising her Household at Calcutta’ (cat. no. 11). She is shown busy among a crowd of attendants and skilled workers. It prompts us to think further—and against the grain of this book—about patronage. How did Mary Impey think about her own enterprise and about the artists? In his poem ‘Company Period’, Arvind Mehrotra posits her regarding Zain ud-Din as another of her specimens, like the cheetah, so that his signature becomes a ‘pug mark’. One hopes that more research will flesh out their actual collaboration beyond such poetic fiction, and make it alive—like their cheetah.
