Birds Exhibition
- September 12, 2021
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Birds Exhibition
Subject – Environment
Context – On display in Delhi, exhibition of 125 paintings of birds from 18th C India.
Concept –
- IN 18th Century India, while the royal courts continued to support artists, new patronage for art came from the Europeans, several of who tasked artists to paint the land and its people.
- Their interests were varied and included among others its birds, as is evident from an exhibition in Delhi that brings together 125 paintings of birds from the various Company-commissioned albums.
- Titled ‘Birds of India, Company Paintings c. 1800 to 1835’, the display at DAG, The Claridges Hotel, is curated from the gallery collection and comprises a variety of birds, including game birds, coastal waders, woodland, and forest birds.
- Viewers at the gallery spot the still common birds — the Brown Wood Owl, Common Sandpiper, Indian Myna, House Crow, and Common Kingfisher.
What was company school of painting?
- ‘Company painting’ is a broad term for a variety of hybrid styles that developed as a result of European (especially British) influence on Indian artists from the early 18th to the 19th centuries.
- It evolved as a way of providing paintings that would appeal to European patrons who found the purely indigenous styles not to their taste.
- As many of these patrons worked for the various East India companies, the painting style came to be associated with the name, although it was in fact also used for paintings produced for local rulers and other Indian patrons.
- The subject matter of company paintings made for western patrons was often documentary rather than imaginative, and as a consequence, the Indian artists were required to adopt a more naturalistic approach to painting than had traditionally been usual.
- Europeans commissioned sets of images depicting festivals and scenes from Indian life or albums illustrating the various castes and occupations, as well as the architecture, plants and animals of the sub-continent.
- While most of the works were painted on paper, there was also a fashion for images of Mughal monuments and Mughal rulers and their wives painted on small plaques of ivory. This increased use of western approaches to painting coincided with the later phases of local painting styles, as manifested in centres such as Lucknow, Murshidabad and Delhi in North India and Mysore and Thanjavur in the South. As a result, the line between ‘company’ painting and later provincial work for local patrons is often blurred.