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… Click here to read more