Forgotten Masters – Wallace Collection, London (last chance to see)

Review of the exhibition Forgotten Masters at the Wallace Collection. A fascinating reclaiming of the artists behind some of the first detailed depictions for a Western audience of India’s flora and fauna, and a period of great creativity and artistic achievement in its own right.

Forgotten Masters at the Wallace Collection

The Wallace Collection was the first gallery I visited as lockdown restrictions began to lift. So while this is not a Covid Diaries entry, it was interesting to come back a month or so later to enjoy the temporary exhibition and see how things were progressing.

Having seen a lot of variations now in terms of how visitors can be kept safe while moving through relatively enclosed spaces, I can confirm the Wallace do it well. Their system of having a maximum capacity per room makes everything very clear and keeps bottlenecks from forming. I appreciated this as I made my way at a leisurely pace through the rooms of the exhibition. Self-policing in the exhibition is key as there are not as many staff here as in the permanent collection. At times this meant there was a bit of a crowd. But enough about that, you came to hear about the exhibition itself, so let me begin!

A Learned Exhibition for a Learned Audience

The current exhibition at the Wallace Collection, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company is hard to describe. Not so much the paintings that are on display, but what its purpose and argument is. I have been reflecting on why this is; the conclusion that I have come to is that it assumes a lot of prior knowledge. This is not an exhibition for the casual passer-by to wander into. Its starting point is some kind of grounding in art history, Indian history, or both.

As long as the right audience comes along, this is an exhibition which aims to add an immense amount of colour, nuance and detail to a tiny little corner of the art historical canon. It’s hugely interesting, but hard to convey the exhibition’s message within the confines of a quick and light-hearted blog post. That is what I have set out to do, however, so I must persevere! Or perhaps you can all go and buy the catalogue and do your own further reading.

Forgotten Masters: The Wallace Collection Brings Them to a Wider Audience

If I take it back to essentials, Forgotten Masters has two aims at heart. The first is to bring a group of superb paintings to a wider audience. The second is to reclaim the identities of the artists who produced them. To give you a bit of background, the exhibition deals with a genre historically referred to as ‘Company Painting‘. This means works which were commissioned by Westerners, often employees of/associated with the East India Company, from Indian artists.

Frequently the patron wished to build a portfolio of natural history paintings; either of their own menagerie, of commercially-grown plants or of wider-ranging flora and fauna. Other works commissioned were of local Indian and colonial life, impressive architectural elevations, or the patron’s own household. Often the commissioners bound finished works into big albums for personal enjoyment or for some professional aim. Most of these albums have now been broken up, though, and individual leaves have entered museum, library or botanical garden collections. A look at the exhibition labels shows many on display have come from Kew and its Edinburgh equivalent.

Who Were the Artists? …

The artists who painted these works came from a wide range of castes. Sidenote: I am using this term as part of the historic context rather than getting into any contemporary complexities; we are talking about the 1700s here. They also came from a variety of regions in India and artistic backgrounds. The commissions were taking place at the time of the disintegration of the Mughal empire, so there were a lot of classically-trained artists looking for new employment. Other artists exhibited here were textile painters or other types of artisans.

There is no firm ‘school’ to delineate therefore. Rather, there was a fruitful blending of styles. Employers showed the artists traditional Western botanical studies to work from, but received back something slightly more individual and lively. The intricate detail of Mughal painting in particular lent itself to the depiction of plants and animals from the Indian sub-continent and further afield, and the works are absolutely beautiful. The patience that must have gone into painting individual fish scales or animal fur hair by hair is incredible.

…And Why Have They Been Forgotten?

But as the exhibition’s title suggests, the individual painters have (until now) largely been forgotten. This is partly due to the function of the works. They were quasi-scientific studies in which the subject matter was more important than the artist behind it. But it was also plain old racism and a bit of post-colonial embarrassment. The accompanying catalogue explores this in more detail. While colonial employers recognised the skill of these artists and extended patronage to them, we can see in surviving documentary evidence indicates that their social standing still depended on colonial hierarchy and caste.

Subsequently referring to ‘Company Painting’ and showing a distinct lack of curiosity about the individual artists has led to a lack of recognition of their skill and achievements. This is despite the fact that many can be easily identified by referring to the aforementioned letters or diaries. And finally, with UK museums and audiences a little disinterested in colonial-era art, and Indian art historians and institutions feeling a little uncomfortable about the ‘Indianness’ of this art created in response to Western commissions, there has tended to be a ‘forgetting’ over the last few decades. So guest curator William Dalrymple along with Dr. Xavier Bray (Director of the Wallace Collection) have here set out to celebrate the individuals and the art itself over what they depicted and for whom.

Some Thoughts on Exhibition Design and Audio Guide

To complete the scene-setting, Forgotten Masters occupies a peaceful spot on the lower level galleries of the Wallace Collection. It spreads out over four or so rooms with walls painted in very peaceful colours complementary to the themes depicted. It begins with some background on the history of the period, and the types of cultural exchange behind the commissions. The viewer then moves through general flora and fauna and a spotlight on the ‘Impey album’. Next are depictions of colonial and Indian life, the ‘Fraser Album’ and architectural works. And the exhibition ends just as some of the artists turn towards a more modern or impressionistic/pictorial style.

There is a free audio guide which I did take this time (I have learned my lesson for now). It consists mostly of selected excepts from an interview between Dalrymple and Bray. The snippets are a bit long for my liking and there are too many of them for a small exhibition. But there is nonetheless quite a lot of rich background information.

The Early Days of Cultural Exchange

In the first room, for example, Dalrymple talks in the audio guide about just how integrated life was during the early days of the East India Company. Approximately 30% of Company officials left property in their wills to Indian women or their mutual children. This helps to contextualise the interest that these officials had in their surroundings beyond an Enlightenment desire to understand/categorise. Some well-chosen paintings depicting this cultural exchange reinforce the point. We see both Westerners adopting elements of Indian life, dress and so on, and vice versa.

One of the best works in the exhibition is in this first room. Yellapah of Vellore depicts himself at work between two assistants, one holding the very album the painting was in. So meta! Both Western paints and traditional pigments in oyster shells are among the tools of his trade. The painting is so fine and so realistic that Yellapah seems to return your gaze. It’s an image that stays with you as you visit the remaining rooms and see the works that he and other artists were producing in that way, from those materials.

Forgotten Masters of Natural History

From there the visitor moves on to a selection of works depicting Indian flora and fauna. Most of the patrons seemed to have imported European watercolour paper imported for this purpose. The big white expanse of paper with little animals peering out helps the exquisite detail to stand out.

As mentioned, the artists were often provided with European natural history models for format, layout and style. Yet what they produced seems to have a lot more life to it. A painting may show a cross-section of various parts of a plant, or a bird’s wing extended to show the plumage, but there is often more of a ‘story’ to it than the viewer may expect. This can be in the bird’s attitude or gaze, in a caterpillar on a branch, and so on. The artistic eye for a composition is never far away. This individual flair is apparent in another way in works by textile artists such as Rungiah. When depicting a wild squash, he seems not to have been able to help filling the space of the paper entirely as he would presumably have done for a chintz or other fabric.

Forgotten Masters of the Impey Album

The works making up the Impey Album (commissioned by Sir Elijah and/or Lady Mary Impey at Calcutta), are among the most beautiful of all the natural history works. There is a room devoted to this commission in the middle of the natural history section of the exhibition. Shaikh Zain ud-Din was the master artist, supported by Bhawani Das and Ram Das. I could have spent hours looking at their renderings of plants and animals including birds, bats, a pangolin and a Malabar giant squirrel. Shaikh Zain ud-Din’s depictions of the Impey household are also superb. What a fascinating insight into that time and place.

The pages from the album are now widely dispersed. The loans here include several from the Minneapolis Museum of Art, donated to this institution by a collector who bought them thinking they were Japanese in origin. It shows how little this period and style of painting is known even to enthusiasts of natural history studies.

Forgotten Masters of Everyday Life

Equally fascinating are the sections on colonial and Indian subject matter. A series of paintings of race horses, carriages and the like makes you consider the gaze of the colonised. At the same time, depictions of various soldiers’ uniforms, and studies of ascetics and religious figures make you think of the desire of the colonisers to make sense of and categorise the world they found themselves in. These works are arresting in their individualism and also humour. I mean this both in terms of what the East India Company men wanted to commemorate (a flea-bitten horse, a new carriage, and elsewhere in the exhibition a street performer eating a sheep), and in how East India Company life is depicted. For example, an English gentleman carried by Indian bearers looks so uncomfortable you almost have to laugh.

The Fraser Album is the focus of the final section, commissioned by civil servant William Fraser. Ghulam Ali Khan and his circle were the artists. The Fraser Album contained images of local people, including cavalry recruits, dancing girls and Afghan horse traders. Many of their names appear, and a strong individualism shines forth in their depictions. This room also has a number of architectural elevations which treat buildings with as much care and attention as other artists treated animals and plants. It finishes with a sub-section of works by Sita Ram. Suddenly the brushwork is a bit looser, the effect a bit more picturesque, and it becomes apparent that this period of traditional techniques adapting to new requirements is evolving into something else entirely.

Final Thoughts

All in all, I think Forgotten Masters at the Wallace Collection achieves what it set out to do. Throughout the course of it the visitor gets a sense of a handful of key artists and their styles. Diligent visitors also learn more about the period, interactions between East and West, and the context of this art.

It’s hard to say which layer of the exhibition’s argument I enjoyed most: the aesthetic value of the works themselves, the importance of the individual artists’ styles to the finished products, the value of this period of cultural exchange to [Indian] art history, or what the works as artefacts tell us about this early period of the colonial foray into India. I always like to learn new things about art history, and this was something which I hope to explore further. I am interest in both the individual artists and this period of cultural exchange, but also the broader point of trying to see the artist and story behind even the most neutral- and scientific-seeming works.

Salterton Arts Review’s Rating: 4/5

Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company until 13 September