A flock of cheep thrills
Delhi’s DAG gallery spreads its wings with a stunning exhibition of bird paintings, created by Indian artists in the European Company style, between 1800 and 1835
It’s not birding season yet (unless you are smart and persistent enough to tap into the passage birding scene — knowing where to look and when as August turns to September). But at the DAG gallery in Delhi, 125 species from across the subcontinent have descended for the next few weeks. There’s a black-hooded oriole and a bluethroated barbet. A scaly-breasted munia has perched atop a flowering tree. Hoopoes, their crowns fanned and upright, look ready to take flight.
The best part: You don’t even need binoculars to spot them. They feature in Birds of India, the first exhibition dedicated to avian species hand-painted by Indian artists in the early decades of the 19th century.
The works are part of DAG’S collection, and come from four albums compiled between 1800 and 1835. Many feature exaggeratedly vivid colours. Some of the works have never been on display before.
Those familiar with Indian art might recognise these as Company paintings, works created when officials from the British East India Company started to document the subcontinent’s distinctive animals, plants, monuments and local communities. In an age before cameras, they’d typically hire Indian artists to do the job, creating a hybrid new style different from traditional miniature works. Company paintings featured real-life subjects rather than scenes from mythology or legend. So they incorporated European influences like linear perspective and naturalistic shading and were done in delicate watercolour, not opaque gouache.
“The research that has been done on the style is mostly scattered; it is still a developing field.” says Giles Tillotson, the show’s curator and the gallery’s senior vice-president of exhibitions and publications. London’s Victoria & Albert Museum has more than 2,000 Company works in its collection.
In 2018, Mumbai’s CSMVS hosted a show titled Indian Life and People in the 19th Century, with 120-odd Company paintings and sculptures from its own collections.
The subject took flight in 2019, with the first UK exhibition of Company paintings at the Wallace Collection museum in London. The show, Forgotten Masters, was curated by writer and historian William Dalrymple, and was an important step in recognising the works as masterpieces of Indian painting. “William’s
IN A TIME BEFORE
PHOTOGRAPHY, ART WAS USED TO DOCUMENT LOCAL CULTURES, FLORA, FAUNA. COMPANY PAINTINGS WERE
SUCH WORKS COMMISSIONED BY OFFICIALS OF THE BRITISH EAST INDIA COMPANY
show looked at superlative examples,” Tillotson says. “But this was popular art too. It started with individual patrons, but quickly, a market for it developed. The work became less refined but more popular.”
The DAG birds, nonetheless, are exceptionally beautiful. Ninety-nine of them are sourced from a single album, and typically for the time, include no record of the names of the artists who painted them. Most of the birds appear to have been worked on by a single painter or a small group of artists following a set style, making it trickier to identify any single name.
But for art lovers and bird-watchers alike, there’s plenty to see at the show. The cinereous vulture is depicted with a snake by his claws. Even the yellow-footed green pigeon, commonly spotted across
India, looks resplendent (and uncharacteristically cocky) in watercolour.
For Tillotson, who grew up in Cyprus and Hong Kong and has been avidly birdwatching in the 40 years he’s lived in India, the exhibition brings together disparate but not-quite-opposing interests.
The DAG has been acquiring a broad range of Company paintings in an effort to expand its interests beyond 20th-century art. For collectors, they’re an emerging category from which to acquire new works. There are already plans to host more exhibitions featuring older paintings, perhaps one on Mughal architecture in the coming months. Tillotson hopes it will attract “a new catchment of people who would otherwise not be interested in art”.