Parting Company: Paintings from India in NYPL's Digital Collections

Among the treasures in the Wallach Division’s Art & Architecture Collection are a set of 135 small paintings which are viewable online in NYPL's Digital Collections. These pictures were collected in the 19th century to take their viewers in Britain and Europe on a virtual sojourn to the continent of India. Experienced today, they still have the power to carry you on a journey to discover their seemingly limitless cloud of context at The New York Public Library.

Victorians’ quest for systematic knowledge of the unknown was linked to the idea of mastering their social and natural environment. This work was primarily, if not exclusively, done by men involved in Colonial administration. While the Industrial Revolution was transforming Northern Europe’s landscape and economy, the viewers of these pictures were able to be virtually transported to an Indian Continent that was romantic, picturesque, and bucolic. Some of the trades depicted in these visual documents have their parallels in British society, such as embroiderers and cooks, highlighting how differently artisans looked in this setting.

Some of these small pictures were made from opaque watercolor paint on “abrak” [Hindi for mica]. Historically, Hindus reputedly considered blocks of mica solidified bursts of lightning, and commenced mining it around 2000 BCE. The English term mica stems from the Latin “micare” [sparkle], and its appearance in the West seems to date back to 17th century Muscovy. British in India in the 18th and 19th centuries referred to it as talc. It was mined in Kodarmah in Bihar, and Chotta Nagpur West of Murshidabad.

Murshidabad underwent an economic shift during the 1812 Recession, as the British East India Company was becoming more ensconced, and became the birthplace of this genre of small paintings. As a result, craftsmen moved to more prosperous places, particularly Kolkata, the “capital” of British India, and Patna on the Ganges.

The artists’ method was to paint the background shapes in color on the back and then fill in the details on the front. The translucent base was smooth and luminous, evoking more costly materials like ivory.

Paintings were sold in sets [puria pr firkha] of 12 pictures that cost about three rupees. The most popular sets were of costumes and castes or occupations. They most often depicted diverse Indian subjects, including festivals, dancers and musicians, sellers and craftspeople, and conveyances.

In time, mica paintings would proliferate in the North in Kolkata [Calcutta], Patna, Varanasi, Delhi, and Lucknow. These paintings were popular later in the South in Chennai [Madras], Thanjavur [Tanjore], and Tiruchirapalli [Trichinopoly].

These paintings fall within a larger category of what are called “Company School” paintings. The “Company” was the English East India Company, chartered in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth I. It became the dominant colonial trading enterprise in the world, and necessitated tens of thousands of British born subjects to live and work on the continent of India, either in the civil service or military. All were directly or tangentally in support of trade among the Americas, Africa, India, and China.

Since Mildred Archer began writing on the subject after Indian Independence in 1948, this style has been known in English as “Company School.” It derives from an Urdu term being used for such works in Patna: Kampani qalam [qalam means picture]. Art historian B.N. Goswamy has suggested in 2019 that the term may have been coined by scholar Rai Krishnadas of Benares or the painter Ishwari Prasad, who came from a family of painters from Patna.

At first, “Company School” Indian artists made works by commission for the British wherever there were British East India Company settlements, and then the pictures traveled to Britain with them when they finished their posting.

“The rich tradition of Mughal painting was still alive when the East India Company began to extend its dominance in the country. The British inherited this highly skilful and gifted team of painters for whom it was their metier. The new relationship between the Indian painter and the British patron as part of a multi-level meeting of East and West resulted in a distinctive style of painting termed ‘Company School’ which flourished for about a century (1760-1860),” writes Pran Nevile in the foreword of Marvels of Indian Painting.

As this indigenous court patronage waned through the 18th century, the skilled painters worked for clients who were less noble out of necessity, farther away from their courts, and accommodated their foreign tastes and interests. Thus, the classic Mughal style, descended from its Persian roots, mixed with Rajput, Deccani, and other regional styles. Increasingly, scholars are studying the endless hybridity of styles, enhanced by the proliferation of scholarship shifting global arts from anthropology to art history.

Holly Shaffer’s 2022 book, Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760-1910 characterizes how “artists and collectors joined materials from diverse sources and groups—violently plundered as well as creatively sutured to speak to diverse audiences as well as their particular interests.” This is the way scholars are increasingly understanding artistic production within the centuries-long and ongoing exchange of cultures within India and globally.

Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy of historical novels: Sea of Poppies; River of Smoke; and Flood of Fire and his nonfiction repository of history that followed, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories, trace the story of how the complex intercontinental trade of which India was an important part, produced new hybrid languages, cuisines, dress, and art. The paintings in The New York Public Library are tangible evidence of this exchange.

Painting  and iconography within this tradition, can be like the game “telephone operator;” the further away that a painter got away from the illustrious illumination workshops of the Mughal Empire, the less refinement there was, and the less defined and specific the subjects. Among the paintings in our collection are multiple different “copies” of the same image that show that they were among the pre-manufactured sets sold to the British in India.