New Delhi: A first-ever exhibition of paintings of Indian birds commissioned by the East India Company in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was opened Saturday in New Delhi.
Titled ‘Birds of India, Company Paintings c. 1800 to 1835′, the exhibition by DAG, an art company, which is also India’s largest inventory of art and archival material, has showcased paintings made by unknown Indian artists from 1800 to 1835 for the first time ever.
Curated by Dr. Giles Tillotson, an expert on the art history of India and a Senior VP Exhibitions and Publications at DAG, the exhibition features 125 paintings from various Company commissioned albums. These include the albums of Cunninghame Graham, an 1810 album featuring 99 paintings of birds from the Northeast and the Faber album from 1830.
The collection also includes four folios by Chuni Lal of Patna — the only artist that remains identified — from the never-seen-before 1835 Edward Inge album.
The exhibition is being showcased at The Claridges Hotel in New Delhi.
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Inspiration behind exhibition
Speaking to ThePrint on what inspired him to curate this collection, Dr Tillotson said, “The idea appealed to me for two reasons. One, personally because as a child who had always been interested in Indian birds, and two because company paintings are relatively a neglected area of Indian art. So I thought it would be fun for us to showcase some company paintings and started with this delightful album of paintings of Indian birds”.
The birds depicted in this exhibition include raptors, game birds, coastal waders, and many woodlands and forest birds, some very familiar and several that are now scarce.
Speaking about the obstacles faced while studying and collecting these paintings, he said, “The major challenge was to find the sequence of these paintings to display them in. The person who probably commissioned certainly collected them together and numbered the folios but they seemed to be rather randomly ordered. So I wanted to put them into some kind of logical sequence according to the type of bird shown.”
“While they were separated and scattered in the album, I wanted to show them into some sort of family groups so that it makes sense from both scientific as well as from an artistic point of view,” he added.
Dr Tillotson further called the works a crucial but rare amalgamation of western science and Indian art.
“The collector is of course British but is trying to label and identify the Indian birds by relying on an English work of reference, which is a book called “A General Synopsis of Birds” published by John Latham. This is a very early period of investigation of all ornithologies around the world and especially in India so although Indian artists were familiar with Indian birds, there hasn’t been a meeting of the two worlds over expertise”.
“This is the crucial moment of the meeting when a European British patron is trying to identify Indian birds and bring to them a western body of knowledge that is still in a very kind of nascent stage”, he added.
Tillotson is the author of numerous books on architecture, history, and landscape such as Taj Mahal (2008), Jaipur Nama (2006), The Rajput Palaces (1987) and The Tradition of Indian Architecture (1989) among others.
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