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Paintings » Indian Paintings » Company School Paintings
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The term 'Company Painting' denotes a vast and disparate collection of drawings, watercolours and paintings on mica, glass, ivory and shell produced during the British colonial period, from the early seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth. It was a type of painting made by the Indian artists specifically for British tastes and needs and is defined as an objective observation of the Indian scene in all its aspects, including natural history and human society.
Company school painters were trained in traditional styles and in the south many of them came from the Tanjore painting tradition and were called "moochys". In the north they were descendants of the Mughal and other miniature traditions of painting. The essential stylistic feature of the company school is a gradual transformation of an indigenous idiom into that of western illusionism, naturalism and perspectivism. This process, however, saw the production of a plethora of hybrid styles and pictorial languages throughout the various centres in which it was practised, usually places where there was a considerable British presence. In northern and western India Delhi, Punjab and Rajasthan were key centres. In the east, Murshidabad, Patna, Calcutta and Oudth and in the south Tanjore, Madras, Malabar and Trichirapalli flourished. Indians painting for Europeans was not just a phenomenon of the 17 and 18 century. There are instances of it in the 16th century itself when Portuguese travellers had commissioned from the local Indian artists pictures depicting Indian people and their way of life to show people back home. These early pictures, now at the Bibliotheca Casanatense in Rome would anticipate the themes of later company school paintings, namely, men and women of various regions and social groups, scenes of transport, trades, agriculture, Indian deities, festivals, etc.
Company Painting for the British began to develop in the late 18th century during the Carnatic and Mysore wars when many British men and women were coming to India and settling mainly in the south. They were not the rough and adventurous people of the previous generation but were from the upper middle class with their own tastes and values. Predictably they were fascinated by what they saw here and were excited by this apparently strange and wonderful place. Everything Indian was for them "picturesque", all very exotic and sublime. Many of them kept sketchbooks and recorded everything that they saw in the form of drawings (the same impulse that makes us take photographs today of places that we visit).
Progressively, it was felt that the Indian artists could do a better job of recording local subject matter because they were far more familiar with them. Indian artists were at this time losing patronage from traditional indigenous sources and were more than willing to cater to the pictorial needs of the British but with considerable changes in their style. The British considered the idioms of the Indian artist as hopelessly naive, supposedly lacking the "important" skills of perspective and shading which he slowly learnt through copying from examples of western art available to them through their patrons. This is of course an instance of pictorial values valourised in European cultures imposed unto an Indian pictorial tradition in which verisimilitude was never a criterion of value. However, it has to be kept in mind it was through colonial patronage Indian artists were able to continue picture making. Company school painting came to an end in the second half of the 19th century primarily due to the emergence of photography, which meant that the British could document India by themselves more effectively. Further the processes of industrialisation undermine the role of the traditional artisan giving way to new hierarchies in art production. |
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