Forgotten Masters
Indian Painting for the East India Company
Photo exhibition of paintings at the 

Aurelec Cafeteria & Art Gallery

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. These masterworks of the Wallace Collection celebrate 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 I857.

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.