RTOA Company School watercolour of a Tragopan pheasant, circa 1820, opaque pigments on...

RTOA Company School watercolour of a Tragopan pheasant, circa 1820, opaque pigments on laid paper, depicted in a landscape, with trimmed borders, in mount, 26.7 x 40.2cm.

Another depiction of the Tragopan pheasant is in the Impey Album, attributed to Shaykh Zayn Al-Din, Calcutta, India, circa 1777-82.

The eighteenth and nineteenth century India witnessed a new genre of painting popularly known as Company School. It was so named because it emerged primarily under the patronage of the British East India Company. The officials of the Company were interested in paintings that could capture the picturesque and the exotic aspect of the land, besides recording the variety in the Indian way of life which they encountered. Indian artists of that time, with declining traditional patronage, fulfilled the growing demand for paintings of flora and fauna, landscapes, historical monuments, durbar scenes, images of native rulers, trades and occupations, festivals, ceremonies, dance, music as well as portraits.

This style of painting arose in a number of different cities. Work from each region is distinguishable by style, which grew out of and was heavily influenced by earlier local traditions. Calcutta was among the important early production centres, as the site of one of the oldest British trade houses. The city's most enthusiastic patrons were Lord Impey, chief justice of the High Court from 1777 to 1783, and the Marquess Wellesley, who served as governor-general from 1798 to 1805. Both had collected large menageries and hired artists to paint each of the birds and animals in them. A Company-established botanical garden in Calcutta then undertook a similar project for the samples of plant life it had collected. Other influential painting centres were in Varanasi, a major Hindu pilgrimage site that drew many tourists (who knew it as Benares), and Madras, where Lord and Lady Clive were stationed from 1798 to 1804. Delhi's market expanded after the city's occupation by the British in 1803. Its magnificent Mughal monuments were the most popular subjects, and its artists were unique in using ivory as a base for painting. Other common subjects from this time were the residences, servants, carriages, horses, and other possessions that Company employees had amassed; Lady Impey was the patron of a number of such scenes.