A Wonderful Window on Anglo-Indian Art

A show of paintings by Indian artists for their English rulers during the 100 years or so that the East India Company ran the subcontinent in the late 18th and 19th century. Sounds quite interesting from a historical point of view, we thought, but maybe not that enthralling. 

Forgotten Masters at the Wallace Collection in London exceeded our expectations by a mile. It's an absolutely fascinating exhibition, entertainingly and beautifully presented (it's curated by William Dalrymple, the historian and author of many books on South Asia), and with some stunning works of art by painters you're unlikely ever to have heard of -- Bhawani Das, Sita Ram, Yellapah. Many of these pictures, it seems, were in albums locked away in drawers and cupboards for decades. They combine the Indian tradition of painting using stone-based pigments mixed in shells with scientific European innovation in areas such as natural history and architecture, and the use of Western watercolours.

These artists are, Dalrymple suggests in the excellent audio tour of the show (taking the form of a conversation with Wallace Collection Director Xavier Bray), the Indian equivalents of Raphael and Donatello in a last flowering of Indian art before it was snuffed out by colonialism. The comparison may be a bit of a stretch, but there's work here of exquisite skill and beauty, particularly when it comes to depictions of animals and plants for British patrons who were infused by the desire for knowledge so common to the age. 

So let's meet the Great Indian Fruit Bat, painted around 1780 by a member of the workshop of Bhawani Das, who was commissioned by the Chief Justice of Calcutta, Sir Elijah Impey, and his wife, Lady Mary, to make natural-history studies, including of their private menagerie. 

And what a great picture it is: This bat is absolutely magnificent. He (you can't fail to notice that) stretches out one wing, displaying the full bone structure and the curved talons he uses to open juicy ripe mangoes. Something of the night about him, there's no doubt, apparently too menacing to be just a strict fruitarian. He's like a caped commendatore ushering a courtesan into a Venetian opera, Dalrymple muses. 

Such lovingly rendered details in this and many other depictions of animals and plants. Such precision. Maybe the apposite comparison is less with Raphael and Donatello, more with Albrecht Dürer and George Stubbs. Stubbs, of course, famously painted a cheetah that had been brought back to England from India, and you can see a cheetah in this show painted by Shaikh Zain ud-Din of Patna, who created most of the 300 works in the Impeys' album. Just how meticulous the Indian artist was can be seen in a finely written column of the great beast's dimensions in the background on the left-hand side. Shaikh Zain ud-Din seems to have been fascinated both by the rhythm of the spots on the cheetah's fur and by the rhythm of the magnificent scales of Lady Impey's Pangolin, its back arched and walking along apparently on its knuckles. 

Frustratingly, we're unable to bring you pictures within this blog post of some of the most wonderful works in this show, because the Wallace Collection has made available only a handful of images for use -- and there's no photography allowed in the exhibition itself. But that's all the more reason to head down there to enjoy it in the flesh. 

Here's one of Shaikh Zain ud-Din's we can show you: Indian Roller on Sandalwood Branch. It has a minimalist Japanese quality to it, and it was indeed once purchased after being mistaken for a Japanese work. The branch appears to have been deliberately curved, the bird posed to bring out the full beauty of the colours of its head, wing and tail.

Another brilliant painter of fauna was Haludar. Even before we went into the show, we were much taken by his Sloth Bear, on offer as a fridge magnet in the Wallace Collection shop. Each strand of the bear's thick fuzzy coat is individually painted. And there's a moloch gibbon, depicted from three angles. We were not alone in admiring the two field mice that were so lifelike -- and cute -- you felt a desire to stroke them and give them treats of nuts and seeds to watch them nibble.

Haludar was a Bengali, and he was employed by Dr Francis Buchanan to record wildlife at the Institute for Promoting the Natural History of India in Barrackpore, near Calcutta. As you're starting to gather, this display highlights the wide range of Indian painting styles. Painters came from a variety of traditions, as we see in the very first room, which introduces us to Yellapah, from Vellore in the south of the subcontinent, who painted himself at work in a remarkable and highly realistic self-portrait. His face scarred by smallpox, Yellapah, who was from the caste then known as the untouchables, looks out at us as he sits cross-legged behind the tea chest he's using to support his paper and paints -- both Indian and European. The chest is propped up at a slight angle by a pair of chocks in front, and he's flanked by two of his assistants.

It's here too we meet John Wombwell of the East India Company, a Yorkshire accountant who's taken to living in Lucknow in 1790 with gusto. Wombwell sits on cushions on a terrace by the river smoking a hookah, in full Mughal rig. It's a reminder that at this period, many Britons in India were entranced by local culture and embraced it. A third of British men in the subcontinent were living with Indian women. It was largely only in the 19th century that a cultural wall went up between the rulers and the ruled.

The Wombwell portrait is another superb picture, very much a Mughal painting with its minimalist landscape on the far bank of the river. A servant standing behind Wombwell with a fly whisk looks as if he could have stepped out of a 1970s David Hockney. And on the wall beside the Yorkshireman, Patna nobleman Ashraf Ali Khan and his mistress also sit smoking hookahs -- but on European chairs.

We mentioned Stubbs earlier, and we walked into one room in this show and immediately thought: "This is the Stubbs room!" There are pictures of horses by Shaikh Mohammad Amir of Karraya and pictures of soldiers by Yellapah that immediately put us in mind of the great British animal painter who worked just a few decades earlier. In Shaikh Mohammad Amir's work, you see the same individual portraits of horses that you get in Stubbs. And just like in Stubbs, the horses have marks where the saddle was, clipped ears and sometimes clipped tails as was the fashion in Britain.

You don't really see British people in Shaikh Mohammad's pictures -- the face of one child with an entourage of Indian servants is completely hidden by her bonnet -- though you do see the symbols of their wealth and power -- an enormous mansion with the native staff tending to the gardens and pond, or in this case the latest transport technology, a super-light gig. Was the lack of European faces an anti-British protest, Dalrymple wonders. We weren't totally convinced by that line.

More fusion comes in the form of pictures commissioned in the early 19th century by the brothers James and William Fraser. William's servant Kala is depicted twice, first in a lungi and turban holding the sword he used to kill a tiger, saving his master's life. That deed led to his promotion, and in the second picture, he's dressed in the rather fanciful uniform, combining French, Scottish and Indian elements, of the irregular cavalry regiment the Frasers commanded.

There are dancing girls here too, the precursors perhaps of today's Bollywood actresses, and looking as if they've just stepped off the 1960s hippie trail, Dover to Delhi in a Volkswagen camper van.

There's a profusion of intricate depictions of plant life in the exhibition. Natural-history enthusiasts had an enormous range of flora to study, sometimes on expeditions, and they engaged local artists to produce detailed drawings. The works capture the beauty and exotic nature of the vegetation. However, it was the usefulness and trade value of the plants and their potential profits that were paramount for the East India Company. It set up botanical gardens not for general enlightenment, but to see if specimens could become the cash crops of their day.

But in this section of the display, too, there's an interesting story about the artists. Delicate plant tendrils carefully arranged to fill open spaces bear witness to the fact that some of them were former painters of textiles, used to making scrolls and curved patterns on the fashionable fabrics that were for destined for the export market.

We spent well over two hours in this splendid show, our first visit to the Wallace Collection's excellent new exhibition space. What a spicy, satisfying mingling of cultures, among the best artistic feasts we've enjoyed in London in 2019.

Practicalities

Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company is on at the Wallace Collection in London until April 19. The gallery is open daily from 1000 to 1700, though it's closed December 24-26. Full-price tickets to the exhibition are good value at £12, or £13.50 including a Gift Aid donation, and you can buy them online here. The Wallace is on Manchester Square, a few minutes' walk north of Selfridges on Oxford St. Bond St is the closest Tube station, but Oxford Circus and Baker St are also within walking distance.

While you're in the Wallace Collection....

You'll want to take some time to explore its treasures. Two paintings that stand out are that classic Dutch Golden Age portrait, Frans Hals's The Laughing Cavalier, and the quintessential image of French 18th-century frippery, The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

Images

Circle of Bhawani Das, Great Indian Fruit Bat, c. 1777-82, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Shaikh Zain ud-Din, Indian Roller on Sandalwood Branch, Impey Album, Calcutta, 1780, Gift of Elizabeth and Willard Clark. © Minneapolis Institute of Art
Sheikh Mohammad Amir, English Gig, c. 1840, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Smithsonian Institution)
Circle of Ghulam Ali Khan, Kala with Sabre Drawn and Kala in Uniform, Delhi, 1815-16, The David Collection, Copenhagen
Vishnupersaud, Arum tortuosum (now Arisaema tortuosum, family Araceae), c. 1821. © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew