Re-evaluating colonial art
He looks, says historian William Dalrymple, like a caped commendatore ushering a woman into a Venetian opera house. In fact, he’s a pointy-eared male fruit bat, with a furry body and prominent genitals, staring without embarrassment at the viewer while extending one cloaklike black wing – as recorded in an astonishingly detailed study of this charismatic creature from an 18th-century colonial menagerie in India.
The private zoo belonged to Sir Elijah Impey, chief justice of Calcutta’s Supreme Court, and his wife, Mary, who commissioned the Muslim painter Sheikh Zain ud-din of Patna to create an album documenting their exotic pets between 1777 and 1783. Supported by a pair of gifted Hindu painters, and working with English watercolours, Zain ud-din executed or oversaw more than 300 stunning sheets – depicting cranes, a cheetah, Lady Impey’s shawl goat from Bhutan, and her pangolin with tapering snout.
Many of them, including that dramatic painting of a fruit bat, acquired around a decade ago by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, are on display in a gallery devoted to the artists of the so-called Impey Album in a new exhibition curated by Dalrymple, Forgotten Masters, at the Wallace Collection in London.
This fascinating show of around 100 works – the first of its kind in Britain – is devoted to brilliant but overlooked Indian artists commissioned by European patrons, mostly officials in the East India Company, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It begins with an 17th-century Mughal dagger from the Wallace Collection, its rock-crystal hilt inlaid with gold and set with rubies, which once belonged to Claude Martin – a Frenchman who set a trend among Westerners for commissioning Indian artists during the 1770s, when he imported 17,000 sheets of European watercolour paper, and invited artists in prosperous Lucknow to embark on a series of illustrations of India’s flora and fauna.
As the show proceeds, the subject matter diversifies – there are paintings of racehorses in the manner of Stubbs, views of Delhi, forensically detailed architectural studies of monuments such as the Taj Mahal, and the picturesque landscapes of Sita Ram, which feel more European in style.
It is, though, the immensely satisfying animal studies and rigorous botanical drawings (which made me think of modernist photographs by the German Karl Blossfeldt), in the exhibition’s earlier stages, which are most memorable. Here, the artists, immaculate designers who were never afraid of deploying intense, saturated hues (which have not faded over time), play with the contrast between audacious sweeps of blank white paper in the background, and passages of phenomenal detail – recording, say, the direction of the hairs that form a gibbon’s fine-furred pelt, or the iridescent sheen of a roller bird’s turquoise feathers. These pictures are as sharp yet sweet as fresh lemonade, and put you in mind of Dürer’s microscopically observed paintings of a clump of turf or a young hare.
Moreover, every animal is, seemingly, blessed with its own carefully individuated character: you may not agree with Dalrymple’s fanciful, witty suggestion that Bhawani Das’s fruit bat is like a Venetian nobleman, but you can’t deny this flying mammal’s dandyish presence and enviable poise.
In the catalogue, Dalrymple touches on the thorny issue of the British Empire, the legacy of which has, in recent decades, become embarrassing, even toxic. This, he argues, explains why these artists have been, as the exhibition’s title puts it, “forgotten”: they used to be grouped together under the heading “Company School” (a reference to the East India Company, emphasising the role of European patrons, but minimising the contribution of the artists), and people have been reluctant to praise anyone associated with this rapacious corporate entity – even though several British institutions hold their masterpieces in depth.
Still, thanks to Dalrymple, that may change. He does a sensitive, subtle job of reframing the argument by focusing attention back on the artists, who fashioned a captivating hybrid style that drew on European and Mughal models. It’s time we ranked their achievements among the glories of Indian painting.
From tomorrow until April 19; 020 7563 9500; wallacecollection.org