Paintings of Company School
The eighteenth and nineteenth century India
witnessed a new genre of painting popularly
known as ‘Company School’. It was so named
because it emerged primarily under the patronage
of the British East India Company. The officials
of the Company were interested in paintings that
could capture the “picturesque” and the “exotic”
aspect of the land, besides recording the
variety in the Indian way of life which they
encountered. Indian artists of that time, with
declining traditional patronage, fulfilled the
growing demand for paintings of flora and fauna,
landscapes, historical monuments, durbar scenes,
images of native rulers, trades and occupations,
festivals, ceremonies, dance, music as well as
portraits.
The Company School paintings display an amalgam
of naturalistic representation and the lingering
nostalgia for the intimacy and stylization of
medieval Indian miniatures. It is this
intermingling that makes the Company school so
unique even though the paintings neither had the
accuracy of the photograph nor the freedom of
the miniatures. The artists of this School
modified their technique to cater to the British
taste for academic realism which required the
incorporation of Western academic principles of
art such as a close representation of visual
reality, perspective, volume and shading. The
artists also changed their medium and now began
to paint with watercolour (instead of gouache)
and also used pencil or sepia wash on European
paper.
‘Company Paintings’ were first produced in
Madras Presidency in South India. This new style
of painting soon disseminated to other parts of
India such as Calcutta, Murshidabad, Patna,
Benares, Lucknow, Agra, Delhi Punjab and centres
in Western India. The introduction of
photography in 1840, however, brought about a
new dimension to painting. Now the emphasis came
on producing works which could capture
“objective reality”.
|