Company Painting in India

Black Stork in a Landscape, ca. 1780. India (Lucknow). Watercolor on European paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Louis E. and Theresa S. Seley Purchase Fund for Islamic Art and Rogers Fund, 2000 (2000.266)

After moving to New York, one of the first things I did was paper my walls with postcards from my travels. My room is a documentation of experiences I’ve had and things I’ve seen, but the snapshots from museums and monuments, streets and storefronts are not holistic portraits of places I’ve been. If someone were to try to glean information about Paris from my photos, they’d only get a limited view, not the big picture: I’m sure Parisians eat things other than dainty pastries and crepes, but I didn’t. Similarly, there are some buildings in Rome that aren’t churches, but I don’t have pictures of any. The images that decorate my room represent a particular experience, not a universal one. I love that my collaged walls tell the story of the life I live, but the limited scope of a representation of a place or experience becomes problematic when the depiction in question is viewed as a historical document. I’ve been thinking about this issue in terms of Company Paintings from India.

Throughout the 1700s, members of the British East India Company wanted souvenirs of the novel sights they encountered in India. While modern tourists would snap photos with a camera (or their iPhones), these travelers enlisted Indian painters to “document” the environs. Many images of this period catalog the flora and fauna of the region, such as this delicate stork.

Other works more explicitly catered to Europeans’ fetish for the exotic. These images depicted festivals, castes, and costumes.

Eight Men in Indian and Burmese Costume, 19th century. India (Delhi). Opaque watercolor, ink, and gold on paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Dr. Julius Hoffman, 1909 (09.227.1)

It’s interesting to consider the complex ways in which enterprising Indians participated in the colonial system. By creating work that pandered to the European taste, and successfully snagging European patrons, Indian artists were able to make a living. However, producing work that was attractive to European collectors sometimes meant exploiting the same kinds of deprecating depictions that were often used to justify colonial projects. How objective were these works? How much—and what—can they tell us about the realities of daily life, and to what extent did they involve exaggerations or salacious additions intended to pique foreigners’ interest? In what ways are these historical artifacts that can tell us about self-representation under colonial rule? Do they represent a particular experience, or a generalized one: do they belong on someone’s wall as a personal artifact, or in an archive as a generalize-able one?

Source:

Sardar, Marika. "Company Painting in Nineteenth-Century India". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cpin/hd_cpin.htm (October 2004)