Enfilade

Exhibition | Indian Painting for the East India Company

Posted in books, catalogues, exhibitions by Editor on June 14, 2019

Shaikh Zain al–Din, Malabar Giant Squirrel, Eastern India, Calcutta, 1778
(Private Collection; photo by Margaret Nimkin)

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From the press release related to the exhibition:

Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company
The Wallace Collection, London,  4 December 2019 — 19 April 2020

Curated by William Dalrymple

In September 2019, the Wallace Collection presents Forgotten Masterpieces of Indian Painting for the East India Company. Curated by renowned writer and historian William Dalrymple, this is the first UK exhibition of Indian paintings commissioned by East India Company officials in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reflecting both the beauty of the natural world and the social reality of the time, these dazzling and often surprising artworks offer a rare glimpse of the cultural fusion between British and Indian artistic styles during this period.

Comprising works from a wide variety of Indian traditions, the exhibition belatedly honours historically overlooked Mughal artists including Shaikh Zain al–Din, Bhawani Das, Shaikh Mohammad Amir of Karriah, Sita Ram, and Ghulam Ali Khan. It will shed light on a forgotten moment in Anglo-Indian history, recognising the vivid and highly original paintings it produced as among the greatest masterpieces of Indian painting.

William Dalrymple, ed., Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2019), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1781300978, $40.

Note (added 25 September 2019) — The original posting listed the exhibition as being open from September until December.

Note (added 22 October 2021) — The original posting listed the title as ‘Forgotten Masterpieces’, rather than ‘Forgotten Masters’.

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