A new exhibition spotlights painters associated with Kampani Qalam, the hybrid art style associated with commissions for the East India Company

When Europeans first established a foothold in India, they were interested in acquiring the subcontinent’s fabulous wealth and in documenting and understanding the cultures therein. By the mid-18th-century, as the East India Company (EIC) secured its dominance, this curiosity led to some enterprising officials commissioning Indian artists to paint for them. The result was a remarkable admixture between sterile British academic drawing and Mughal and Indic traditions; “Company Art.”

This history, stretching from the 1770s to the 1840s, is the subject of a new, first-of-its-kind exhibition in London, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company. Curated by William Dalrymple, a well-known historian of British India, the exhibition eschews the term “Company School” to avoid obscuring “…the distinctive artistic contributions of the artists who actually painted them.” By focusing on Kampani Qalam (the Urdu name for this hybrid art style) and its practitioners, the Wallace Collection exhibition informs us about the Indian artists; a rarity when it comes to Western discourse regarding Company Art.

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