It was first in 2019 that the Delhi Art Gallery (DAG) embarked on a mission to spotlight Company Painting, a distinctive hybrid style that emerged in the Indian subcontinent in the 18th and 19th centuries, combining regional court painting traditions with Western techniques. Created by local artists trained in royal ateliers for commissions from European patrons (mainly East India Company officials), these paintings were among the few fruitful collaborations that emerged from encounters between the colonizer and the colonized.
DAG initially collaborated that year with the Wallace Collection, UK, for a seminal exhibition titled Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, curated by William Dalrymple. This introduced global audiences to Company artists such as Sita Ram, Ghulam Ali Khan, Bhawani Das and Shaikh Zain-al-Din -- artists who Dalrymple compared to Donatello. For Birds of India (2021-2024), the second exhibition on this subject curated by Giles Tillotson, DAG dipped into its own archives of Company-period ornithological paintings.
Now, with its third and most ambitious exhibition to date -- A Treasury of Life: Indian Company Paintings c. 1790-1835 -- the gallery presents 200 paintings, curated again by Tillotson, who classified them into three sections: Natural History, Architecture & Landscape, and Indian Costumes & Trades. Viewing these in chronological sequence is like paying a visit to your countryside relatives. You first go through their garden, lush with regional flowers, fruits, birds and animals, then admire and enter their house, and finally meet the residents.
In each painting, the ‘specimen’ is placed at the centre of a blank sheet, giving the illusion of being contained in vacuous vitrines or niches, and appearing like 2D pressed flowers, taxidermal figures and miniature dolls. They are further arranged in rows or grids with surgical precision, not a centimetre out of line, not a brick laid wrong, not a feather amiss. The neatness resonates with the colonial intent behind these paintings, before photography arrived in India in the mid-1850s: to study every exotic, local find for purposes ranging from scientific analysis, governance, collecting, or just wide-eyed curiosity.
Album Art
Called Kampani Qalam in Urdu, this Indo-European painting style thrived in British settlements such as Madras, Tanjore, Calcutta, Murshidabad, Benares, Patna, Agra, Delhi and Lucknow. The Company genre first received formal structure and definition in the early 20th century, after English art historian Mildred Archer began cataloguing the East India Company’s collection of paintings in 1954 at the India Office Library.
It must also be clarified that the term was only used for works produced by Indian artists, and not those by British officials like James Forbes and Captain Charles Gold, employed with the East India Company. The latter were clubbed with other visiting English artists to India, like William Hodges, Thomas and William Daniell, and Tilly Kettle, called ‘Orientalist’ painters. The DAG catalogue accompanying the show clarifies these parallel painting traditions, besides providing details of each artwork, their historical context and socio-political relevance.
Company paintings evolved as public and private collections. The public works aroused the scientific curiosity of Europeans and botanical organizations like the Kew Gardens, besides fuelling the import of seeds or rare species from the colonies to study and propagate back home. The private works were preserved as bound folio albums by Company patrons, who perhaps revisited these pages in solitude to reminisce their time in the subcontinent. Company paintings are usually referred to by their patron’s name -- for instance, the Impey Album by Elijah and Mary Impey, the Fraser Album by William and James Fraser, and The Parlby Album by Louisa Parlby. A Treasury of Life is made from the loose pages of such albums. The display of one such complete album, in physical form or on video, would have given a better sense of the size, cover, colour and texture, and broken the 2D reverie of flat, wall-mounted artworks.
Botanical Studies
The displayed botanical illustrations are of carefully mounted floral sprigs, longitudinal sections and still-lifes of fresh produce, wild birds, beasts, beetles, butterflies and even undulatory snakes. Majority of the paintings were commissions by Louisa Parlby, wife of the Company engineer James, who created a menagerie at their house in Maidapur (located between erstwhile Calcutta and Murshidabad). The Indian artist must have delighted in replicating these subjects that formed part of his diet, rites, ritual and medication. It, however, required the undoing of certain techniques taught at court ateliers, as demanded by Company patrons, who provided the artist with European botanical illustrations as templates. When viewed in tandem with Mughal, Rajput and Pahari works, one gauges the move from opaque paint to watercolours, along with the use of muted tones and single-point perspectives.
For the viewer’s benefit of what the ‘template’ could look like, DAG juxtaposed a few botanical paintings by James Forbes, a Company officer, artist, writer and botanist stationed in 1770s Gujarat. Tillotson highlights that copying a painting to learn different styles was integral to the Indian painter’s training. But he adds: “It’s not the kind of copying we connect to plagiarism, which is destructive….The Jaipur City Palace collection has an original portrait of Aurangzeb during his lifetime, and next to it is a copy by a Jaipur artist, probably learning to paint in the Mughal style.”
Monumental Gaze
Apart from natural specimens, the colonists were captivated by the sheer symmetry and intricate motifs of Mughal monuments. These ideals are depicted in the frontal and bird’s eye views of the Qutub Minar and Moti Masjid (Delhi), the Buland Darwaza (Fatehpur Sikri), the cenotaph of Akbar (Sikandra) and the Taj Mahal (Agra). Eager patrons, like French Company officer Jean Baptiste Gentil, would buy large sheets of imported white paper, cut and paste to size, and have gridlines drawn and prepped for his artist, as recorded by historian Malini Roy in her catalogue essay. Except for Patna artist Chuni Lal and Murshidabad artist Sita Ram, the Indian painters are identified only by their provenance or local ingrained court styles, like “Agra/Tanjore artist.”
Hints of gold pigment on certain works, like the panoramic view of the Agra Fort (1808), serve as a quiet nod to the Mughal miniature tradition. To the discerning viewer, two paintings on Chini ka Rauza in Agra (by Chuni Lal and an unidentified Agra artist) and two on Salim Chisti’s mausoleum in Fatehpur Sikri (by Sita Ram and an unidentified Agra artist) offer a comparison in paintingstylesandperspectives.
This display of Mughal-era architecture can be studied against ten paintings on the facing wall, which refer to colonial mansions at Maidapur. Their minimalistic facades with a few Victorian-era embellishments, grand exterior staircases and pillars appear subdued in contrast, but impress with their attention to documentation. This includes identifying houses and their British residents. The sparse gardens with trees planted away from the mansions might seem odd, but scholar Rosie Llewellyn-Jones in the catalogue essay explains that vegetation was “considered unhealthy” due to the possible infections it could cause.
Costumes, Customs and Careers
This category of paintings helped British patrons get acquainted with ‘strange or exotic’ Indian customs and trades. The displayed works includes the “Funérailles” (1800) series by a Madras Company artist, showing the seated corpse of a Brahmin sanyasi during his last rites; or the penitential Charak Puja ritual of hook-swinging from a pole. Paintings from the trade albums classify a variety of 18th-19th-century occupations such as weaving, basket making, salt collecting, stool painting etc., demonstrated largely through a husband-wife duo in native garbs and holding tools of their trade.
A shift in rituals and even skin tone is noticeable in the 48 paintings at the tail end of the show, all commissions from French Company officials based in Pondicherry and Machilipatnam. Many of these are pages from illustrated French books, presenting indigenous moeurs et usages (customs and traditions). The usage of French words will tickle the curiosity of linguists: swimmers (nageurs), priest (poussary), toddy tapper (sourere) and his wife (femme de sourere), Shiva (Issaniane), a Thirunallar temple procession (Ouricaty Tirounal). It would have helped to have English translations of these, especially the long sentences featured within paintings, which seem to have coded messages, begging for interpretation.
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As Company Painting commissions grew as with the power of the East India Company, the local Indian painter would have faced a cruel conundrum. Despite witnessing the fall of the Mughals and the rise of nationalistic fervour with the Sepoy Mutiny (1857), he could never paint these ground realities and engage with other colonial struggles against economic exploitation, famine, smallpox, etc.
The DAG curatorial team has done well to bring out these insights and connect these works with contemporary debates and discourses. For instance, in her catalogue essay, Kanupriya Sharma urges the viewer to recognize ties between Company painting ethnographic categorizations and present-day “caste hierarchies and social discrimination in India.” Much of the classification also pandered to “aestheticizing and othering the people of India” for the Europeans to feel a “sense of intellectual authority over the colonized subjects.” Not giving credit where due, as with the missing names of individual painters is a case in point.
Featured in the show are four paintings of the Coromandel Coast trades by Charles Gold. These works were first published in his book Oriental Drawings (1806), which reveal his unsavoury thoughts. For the painting, “Coolies at Dinner on the Road,” he wrote: “…the highest ranks of Brahmins, Gentoos and Tamuls, feed themselves with the bare hand, and squat down to their victuals like monkeys.” About the “Female Brahmins Carrying Water from the Well,” he notes that “were it not for their complexions, they might be termed beautiful.” The exhibition must constantly contend with such archaic views, and both historicize and critique them, even as it celebrates the beauty of the works that emerged from these interactions.