At first glance this is a dazzlingly beautiful catalogue for the exhibition
presently at the Wallace Collection in London. The focus is on forgotten
paintings by Indian artists working for the British in the last years of the
18th century and in the first half of the 19th century. The exhibition has
been curated by the renowned author William Dalrymple and the catalogue
includes mostly impressive essays on the subject by the leading scholars in
the field. Dalrymple, rightly in my opinion, tries to get away from the old
term for such paintings ‘Company School’ and instead focuses on the
artists themselves, each of whom was of the highest calibre. The Wallace
Collection has been fortunate to assemble and borrow eighteen superb
paintings done for the Scottish brothers William and James Fraser in the
years around 1815/1816. For many years these paintings were completely
unknown to studies until their rediscovery in the late 1970s and their
subsequent sale by the Fraser family at Sothebys in two sales in 1979.
Since then the folios have been widely dispersed in both public and private
collections across the world but they are rightly lauded as the most
remarkable commission of Company paintings in existence. New evidence
has only come to light this year supporting the belief that the artist of the
Fraser folios was closely associated with the Imperial Court painter
Ghulam Ali Khan and the exhibition also includes brilliant and colourful
works by him, again drawn from various sources.
Murshidabad in Bengal and Patna in Bihar had each been famous for their
Mughal-trained painters working for the Muslim Courts in the 18th
Century. With the decline of these Courts many of these remarkable
painters migrated to Calcutta to work for British patrons. Influenced by
European painters and available prints they adapted their style to suit their new patrons yet retaining an essentially Indian sensibility in their work. In
the late 1770s the Chief Justice Sir Elijah Impey and his wife, both
passionate about Indian painting, employed three brilliant painters to create
exotic images of Indian birds and animals that are among the most
spectacular and colourful paintings of such known to studies. Shaikh Zain
ud-Din is perhaps the best known of the three masters for his meticulous
detail and the positioning of birds each perched on a branch of a flowering
or sometimes fruiting tree. Both his work and that of Bhawani Das and
Ram Das retain an essential Mughal finesse and a deep understanding of
their subjects. One of the most intriguing and original essays in the
catalogue is by Malini Roy. She focuses on another much less known
Bengali artist - Haludar. He was employed by the Scottish surgeon Dr
Francis Buchanan-Hamilton in the early years of the 19th century to paint
animals which he rendered with extraordinary accuracy but at the same
time creating works of art of the highest order.
Despite the impressive production of the catalogue, the excellent
illustrations of the magnificent exhibits and some really informative and
interesting essays - Rosie Llewellyn-Jones’s essay on the Master Artists of
Lucknow and Jerry Losty’s essay on the enigmatic but gifted painter Sita
Ram are both splendid - there are too many obvious errors in the catalogue
that leave one underwhelmed. The forward by the Director of the Wallace
collection makes a false start by stating that this is the first exhibition of its
kind held in the UK. Hartnoll and Eyre and then Eyre and Hobhouse held
numerous exhibitions of such paintings and of equal quality throughout the
1970s and early 1980s. More worrying is that successive essayists have
taken as fact that the patron of the so called ‘Lucknow Menagerie’
paintings of birds and reptiles was the remarkable polymath Claude Martin.
In fact the evidence of any connection to Martin for this group of paintings
is extremely thin - yet it forms a significant part of William Dalrymple’s
discourse. Similarly he suggests that a glorious folio of an hibiscus in the
Chester Beaty collection is by Mihr Chand and also tries to connect it to
Martin - without any proper evidence! Lucian Harris includes an
illustration of a marriage scene as by the great Calcutta artist Shaikh
Muhammad Amir of Karaya (fig 32) and yet this attribution is extremely
doubtful and some have suggested that it is a fake.
This is very much an exhibition that reflects Dalrymple’s personal
preferences - but there are just too many Botanical and Natural History
paintings and yet the fascinating festival scenes by the great Patna painters
like Sewak Ram and Bhavani Baksh are completely ignored. There is
nothing in the exhibition by Nevasi Lai despite the wealth of such paintings
down the road at the Wellcome Collection and the intriguing Lucknow interiors and harem scenes hardly get a mention. Despite these
shortcomings and there are others - the sheer quality of the exhibits and
some excellent scholarship makes this catalogue worth buying and the
exhibition itself is certainly a spectacular feast for one’s eyes.
|