Company paintings of the Taj Mahal and Agra.

The Mughal emperors Akbar the Great, Jahangir (r. 1605-1627), and Shah Jahan (Pl. III), the builder of the Taj Mahal, ruled India during the golden age of the empire, and all were sophisticated patrons of the arts. (1) They supported generations of painters, musicians, jewelers, and silversmiths who worked for the court. In the middle of the eighteenth century, as the British presence in India expanded, the power of the Mughal court waned, and court patronage of the arts declined. Indian painters sought work wherever they could find it, and many offered their talents to British patrons. In the early nineteenth century Indian artists adapted their skills to the desires of this new clientele, incorporating Western painting techniques and subjects, and developing a genre known as company painting, referring to the East India Company, the establishment responsible for British trade in India since the early seventeenth century. (2)

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Company paintings can be distinguished from other Indian paintings by their materials, style, and subject matter. They were primarily executed on English paper made by a number of British companies specifically for use by the East India Company in the humid tropics. (3) For their Western patrons, Indian artists often used gouache or the more traditional English medium of watercolor. Indian miniature paintings were typically done in gouache using a labor-intensive process of burnishing the pigment, a practice brought to India by Persian artists in the sixteenth century. (4) Their vivid, jewel-like tones were well suited to the tastes of the Mughal court. Indian artists in the early nineteenth century continued to paint in gouache, but they also incorporated watercolor washes that appealed to Western patrons, many of whom were amateur artists themselves.

Indian artists learned about Western painting styles and subject matter largely from imported European paintings and prints, which they had access to at least as early as the sixteenth century, and incorporated motifs from them into their own work. (5) Eighteenth-century customs records and newspaper accounts reveal a lively trade in European prints in Madras and Calcutta. (6) Some Indian artists may have had the opportunity to learn directly from European artists. Arthur William Devis, Johann Zoffany, William Hodges, Thomas Daniell, and his nephew, William Daniell, all painted in India.