National Museum, New Delhi, celebrates the cultural diversity of India with its exhibition of nineteenth-century Company paintings; “Company Painting- Visual Memoirs of Nineteenth-Century India”. The show will remain on view for two months
Company Paintings in India has been gaining popularity in recent times thanks to the many books that are being written about the huge body of work from the 18th and 19th century. There have been a few exhibitions in recent times that have also contributed to the buzz. The National Museum, National Gallery of of Modern Art, Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, and Victoria Memorial Hall and Botanical Survey of India, Kolkata have very rich repositories of company paintings, which by documenting Indian way of life in all its diversity, tradesmen, art and craft, flora and fauna, today, lend themselves to offering fresh perspective and comparative study of history, sociology, and trade. The artists who were primarily hired by the English and other European nationals were from different parts of India, and it is interesting to see how their influences were felt in what can be termed as European style heavily influences by local art.
National Museum, New Delhi, celebrates the cultural diversity of India with its exhibition on nineteenth-century painting; “Company Painting- Visual Memoirs of Nineteenth-Century India”. The show will remain on view for two month. For the past couple of years, paintings of this period have drawn significant attention worldwide. Yet, the premium collection of these paintings in Indian museums has largely remained away from public view. The exhibition was envisaged to bring forth a significant collection featuring never seen before paintings from the rich repositories of the National Museum, National Gallery of Modern Art, Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, and Victoria Memorial Hall and Botanical Survey of India, Kolkata. This exhibition will give a fresh perspective on various dimensions of Indian life and artistic practices of the time. The exhibition is supplemented with a catalogue that gets together works from various collections, many paintings being brought out for the first time. Particular attention was given to enhance visitors’ experience in the exhibition space with the help of interactive digital interfaces.
“The exhibition is about India and its people, their day-to-day life, rich cultural traditions and the natural surroundings. It is also the story of the resilience of many unknown and known Indian artists who did not give up when the traditional model of patronage and employment collapsed at the dawn of modernity – Dr. Savita Kumari, Assistant Professor, Dept of History of Art, National Museum Institute
More than 200 Company Paintings on Display
Talking about the Painting Department’s collection of the National Museum, where she serves as the Assistant Curator, Dr. Kanak Lata Singh said, “National Museum has more than sixteenth thousand paintings of different schools, made on different organic materials. I am happy to work for this exhibition and for the publication of these paintings. For discovering these paintings from the collection of the National Museum, especially for this exhibition, the valuables contribution of the staff of the National Museum is worth appreciating.”
Splendid Indian Maharajas; Indian Aristocrats; Europeans in India; European Print and Indian Painting; Many Paths, One Reality; Indian Deities, Processions, and Ceremonies; Trades and Professions; Vignettes of Everyday Life; Portraitures of Women; Indian Architecture; and Studies of the Natural World.
The section includes significant collections like zoological studies of John Fleming and botanical paintings from the famous ‘Roxburgh Icons
Overall, the exhibition is a pictorial memoir that will take the viewers on a journey of the culturally vivid and diverse period of nineteenth-century India. It will provide a rare chance to see the works of great masters like Ghulam Ali Khan, Latif, Sheikh Mohammed Ameer of Karayya and Sani, among many other unknown masters. The digital interventions in the exhibition are bound to make a family outing fun.