Forgotten masters : Indian painting for the East India Company / William Dalrymple ; with Lucian Harris, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones. J. P. Losty, H. J. Noltie, Malini Roy, Yuthika Sharma and Andrew Topsfield.

London : Philip Wilson Publishers, 2019.

192 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 29 cm

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, The Wallace Collection, 4 December 2019 to 19 April 2020.

"As the East India Company extended its sway across India in the late eighteenth century, many remarkable artworks were commissioned by Company officials from Indian painters who had previously worked for the Mughals. Published to coincide with the first UK exhibition of these masterworks at The Wallace Collection, this book celebrates the work of a series of extraordinary Indian artists, each with their own style and tastes and agency, all of whom worked for British patrons between the 1770s and the bloody end of the Mughal rule in 1857. Edited by writer and historian William Dalrymple, these hybrid paintings explore both the beauty of the Indian natural world and the social realities of the time in one hundred masterpieces, often of astonishing brilliance and originality. They shed light on a forgotten moment in Anglo-Indian history during which Indian artists responded to European influences while keeping intact their own artistic visions and styles. These artists represent the last phase of Indian artistic genius before the onset of the twin assaults - photography and the influence of western colonial art schools - ended an unbroken tradition of painting going back two thousand years. As these masterworks show, the greatest of these painters deserve to be remembered as among the most remarkable Indian artists of all time"-- Dust jacket.

Indian painting for the East India Company

English

July 09, 2021

Includes bibliographical references (pages 189-191).