Company Paintings

Ethnographic mapping and documentation of a vast country like India was an important part of the political and economic expansion of the East India Company from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards.

This led the Company to invite several landscape and portrait artists from Europe and later, mainly Britain, to paint India.

Beginning with portraitist Tilly Kettle, and soon after by landscapist William Hodges, over the next century these artists painted extensively for the Company as well as for private patrons. Charles d’Oyly’s Views of Calcutta and its Environs, Thomas and William Daniells’ Oriental Scenery, and F. B. Solvyns’s The Costumes of Hindoostan and later, the Peoples of India series, shone light on India, her landscapes and lifestyles, for people in Europe.

In their wake, the Company commissioned artists to paint cities, monuments, flora and fauna, and recorded physiognomies, costumes and festivals of the people of India. Together, these paintings came to be regarded as the Company School.

A large number of Company painters were anonymous Indian artists and artisans from the impoverished courts of Murshidabad, Lucknow and Patna, and declining miniature schools, drawn into the service of European artists. Many of these paintings, aquatints and drawings featured in publications that were all the rage in Britain. Indians who painted in this style created an amalgamation of India’s miniature tradition and Western naturalist technique, incorporating European elements of depth and salon art features such as draperies and studio backdrops. Gradually, these paintings became frozen embodiments of colonial notions of Indian life, thus reducing the artists to artisans.