Forgotten Masters
14th February 2025-
Coppersmith barbet, Company School, early 19th century
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Study of Indian flower, Company School, early 19th Century
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Black hooded oriole, Company School, early 19th Century
As the East India Company expanded its reach beyond trade to administration and diplomacy across the subcontinent during the 18th and 19th century, huge numbers of officers, and later their families, were stationed in the region. With a thirst for knowledge of their new surroundings, European officials commissioned local artists to document local flora and fauna, stimulating a new genre that became known as ‘Company School’.
Accomplished Indian artists developed a hybrid Indo-European style through adopting a botanical style of drawing from Europe, paired with a high attention to detail drawn from late-Mughal painting techniques. Paintings produced by experienced local artists became widely popular with wealthy Europeans both at home and abroad. East India Company officials (who were not employed as medics or botanists) built personal collections of paintings as a record of India’s natural history. The fine, detailed works, invariably executed in watercolour on paper, were often kept together in portfolios or albums.
In February 2020, The Wallace Collection hosted an exhibition titled, ‘Forgotten Masters. Indian Painting for the East India Company’, guest curated by William Dalrymple, author of a book of the same name (published in 2019). The author sums up this period of artistic output from India as a last gasp of creativity.
“These artists represent the last phase of Indian artistic genius before the onset of the twin assaults; photography and the influence of western colonial art schools, ended an unbroken tradition of painting going back two thousand years.”
There are thirteen grouped lots (136-148) of early 19th Century, Company School watercolours in the Old Masters, European and British Painting sale on Wednesday 5th March. Fresh to market, the paintings depict birds and flowers, each variously inscribed in English and Devanagari and were consigned from a private, family collection. The watercolours sold strongly, achieving a combined total of £21,420 (with fees).
