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lot 24

lot 24

Company Painting

A Shri-Vaishnava Brahmin and his wife

gouache on paper
folio 14.25 x 9.75 in. (36 x 25 cm.)
painting 13.5 x 9.25 in. (34.5 x 23.5 cm.)
Tanjore, c. 1800

Winning Bid: $ 900

Estimate: US$ 1,000 - 1,500

Lot Closed

Lot Details

PROVENANCE
H. Kevorkian collection, no. 1111
Private Collection, USA

A Brahmin and his wife stand in a landscape, he dressed in a white red-fringed dhoti with a red shawl over his shoulder and carrying a palm-leaf manuscript, she in a red and green sari and yellow blouse. She of course wears the heavy gold jewellery of south India, while he has large gold hoops in his ears. His tilak mark on his forehead, the Urdhva-pundra, indicates he is a Shri-Vaishnava.

Albums illustrating the various castes and occupations of the people of south India were a speciality of the Tanjore muchis, originally leather-workers, who became the predominant caste of artists in south India in the British period. The albums were produced from about 1770 to 1820 and generally showed couples standing side by side, a man and his wife, carrying the implements of their profession or trade. They remained essentially static, although at a later period the figures were assembled into grander groups or processional scenes.

The style of the page with plain blue sky enlivened by clouds diving through it and a ground sloping back a to tree-covered horizon indicates a date after 1800, when more picturesque types of landscape were introduced into Tanjore painting. U-shaped shadows become ubiquitous at this date. For paintings of comparable date from Tanjore, see Archer 1972, pl. 4, and Archer 1992, no.2(14), p. 56.

REFERENCES
Archer, M., Company Drawings in the India Office Library, HMSO, London, 1972
Archer, M., Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1992

EXPERT : J. P. Losty
J. P. Losty was for many years curator of Indian visual materials in the British Library in London and has published many books and articles on painting in India from the 12th to the 19th centuries.

Artiana would like to thank J. P. Losty for his expertise and assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.

Company Painting

‘Company painting’ is a broad term for a variety of hybrid styles that developed as a result of European (especially British) influence on Indian artists from the early 18th to the 19th centuries. It evolved as a way of providing paintings that would appeal to European patrons who found the purely indigenous styles not to their taste. As many of these patrons worked for the various East India companies, the painting style came to be associated with the name, although it was in fact also used for paintings produced for local rulers and other Indian patrons.

The subject matter of company paintings made for western patrons was often documentary rather than imaginative, and as a consequence, the Indian artists were required to adopt a more naturalistic approach to painting than had traditionally been usual. Europeans commissioned sets of images depicting festivals and scenes from Indian life or albums illustrating the various castes and occupations, as well as the architecture, plants and animals of the sub-continent. While most of the works were painted on paper, there was also a fashion for images of Mughal monuments and Mughal rulers and their wives painted on small plaques of ivory. This increased use of western approaches to painting coincided with the later phases of local painting styles, as manifested in centres such as Lucknow, Murshidabad and Delhi in North India and Mysore and Thanjavur in the South.