10 / The Natural World

Company Painting takes its name from the East India Company, the officials of which were its first patrons. As British employees of the East India Company began relocating to India, often with their families, they desired images of their new surroundings. Although some British artists fulfilled this need, it was primarily Indian artists who met the demand and came to be known as Company School painters. Some of the images produced by these artists were sent back to England as a record of life in India. More often, however, they stayed in the possession of the long-term British residents who commissioned them.

The Company School was not defined by one style. Rather, local artistic traditions influenced the paintings produced in different cities throughout India. The degree to which artists incorporated Western techniques into their work also varied. The detailed rendering of the stork in this image, for instance, has precedents in earlier Mughal studies of animals, while the receding landscape points to European influence, as does shading and the use of muted watercolors in place of brilliantly colored gouaches.

The images produced by Company artists for British patrons ranged from portraits and images of Indian dress and customs to scenes of the landscape and images of specific flora and fauna. The documentation of plants and animals was in keeping with similar practices in Europe. Such studies contributed to the growing interest in natural history that accompanied the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The documentation of the natural world was a means of gaining knowledge about a new habitat. They also reflected European colonial impulses. The collection of samples from the environment—whether specimens or reproductions—might be understood as an implicit assertion of possession.