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- [00:01]
Anita Arnan
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening, and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com. imagine what's possible when learning doesn't get.
- [00:22]
William Drimple
In the way of life at Capella University.
- [00:24]
Anita Arnan
Our game changing flexpath learning format lets.
- [00:27]
William Drimple
You set your own deadline so you can learn at a time and pace that works for you. It's an education you can tailor to your schedule. That means you don't have to put your life on hold to pursue your professional goals. Instead, enjoy learning your way and earn.
- [00:41]
Anita Arnan
Your degree without missing a beat.
- [00:42]
William Drimple
A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella. Edu this episode is brought to you by Intuit. TurboTax didn't file with TurboTax last year. That's in the past. Now Taxes is getting the TurboTax app and filing your own taxes for free. If you didn't file with them last year, file by February 18th. All tax forms, all 100% free. Now this is Taxes Intuit TurboTax. New filers and filers who didn't use TurboTax last year only must start and file your own taxes in app by February 18th. Excludes TurboTax Live full terms@turbotax.com hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan.
- [01:33]
Anita Arnan
And me, William Drimple.
- [01:35]
William Drimple
So the last episode, which you were more hilarious than you've ever been, where this is a whole series about gardens and you came to the garden part of it in the last three minutes. It's a record. It's a preamble, even for you. It's a fair amount. It was interesting, it was fascinating, and I really loved it. But the brief. The brief, man, the brief. We are now going to Calcutta because we had a little bit of a sort of a mini relay race, really, with Lucknow handing over to Calcutta, if we can put it that way, and that is really through the personality of two men, Martin on one side and a man called Sir Elijah Impey on the other. So, Willi, just like we did with luck now, and we painted a picture of this great Rome of India, the magnet of all artists, music, you know, all high culture. What was Calcutta like in the 1700s? Around about the same time.
- [02:28]
Anita Arnan
So Calcutta was an extraordinary mess, as the best possible description of it. There's a French general who turns up at this time and he says, if you took all the towns of England and threw Them up in the air and jiggled them around, they would fall down, rather as Calcutta has. How is it, he says, that a town this rich, so full of fortunes, is unable to have a single straight street? No crescent is crescent shaped, but wiggles in the middle. And it's basically a town full of people on the make. It was the eastern equivalent of one of those gold rush towns in California, where everyone had come to try and make a fortune as quickly as possible and leave with their money. Even Robert Clive, who's one of the most ruthless of them all, is appalled by the ruthlessness of Calcutta.
- [03:19]
William Drimple
He says, well, that's saying something.
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Anita Arnan
Yeah, Calcutta is one of the most wicked places in the universe. Rapacious and luxurious beyond conception.
- [03:30]
William Drimple
Well, that's something. On TripAdvisor, even Robert Clive found this a little too much. So, I mean, this is a city. Why was it so sort of messed up? Is it because it got rich very quick and there just wasn't the planning to keep up with it?
- [03:44]
Anita Arnan
Yeah, it got rich very quick, but people died even quicker. And if you go to South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta, as I did two weeks ago, you see these enormous tombs with obelisks and pinnacles and sort of odd mogul domes, all mixed up in a mess together on a vast scale. So everyone is rich, but it's a city where great wealth could be accumulated, you know, in a matter of months, then lost in a minute at a wager at the whist table. And death was always there. Someone was always arriving new and going straight to the auction house where the person who just died was having his goods auctioned off to send back to his relatives in England. And there were enormous Palladian mansions, but no one was sort of caring for them. And it was just a place on the make.
- [04:38]
William Drimple
It's a brilliant picture you painted, but I'm just reminding you. So this is a series about gardens. Now, in a place that is so unplann and chaotic, one assumes that actually parks and gardens and that kind of thing is not foremost in people's minds in Calcutta.
- [04:56]
Anita Arnan
No. And it's totally unplanned. And the only park is associated with the hero of this episode, who is a character called Sir Elijah Impey. And the park street, which is at the center of Calcutta to this day, where I went to a literary festival last week in Calcutta at Park street, and where South Park Street Cemetery that I was just talking about backs off. That park was created by one man, Sir Elijah Impey, who is the man that takes the flame of this style of painting that we're talking about from Lucknow all the way to Calcutta. And he's from Hammersmith. And in fact, if you're another local.
- [05:34]
William Drimple
Lad, just local references, south west London.
- [05:37]
Anita Arnan
If you go to Hammersmith and get stuck on that terrible roundabout, you are going round and round. Sir Elijah Impey's. Not only his house, which is sort of beneath the underground station, but you know the church on that roundabout, on the Hammersmith roundabout that's got a spire.
- [05:55]
William Drimple
That you can see. Well, as you're grumbling about the traffic.
- [05:58]
Anita Arnan
Yes, you're grumbling about the traffic and stuck. Well, Elijah Impeach in there. He's buried in an enormous monument that survives to this day, built of elaborate white marble with wonderful statuary and inscription, remembering his time when he was the first Chief justice of the new Supreme Court. And he was a very controversial figure from the beginning because he got his job because his friend Warren Hastings was appointed the Governor General and Impey had been at Westminster with him. They were school friends from London.
- [06:34]
William Drimple
The old boy network again.
- [06:36]
Anita Arnan
Old boy network, surprise, surprise. We talk about the English and what do you find? And in due course, he actually exonerates Hastings when he's brought to trial. And then, of course, both of them are impeached and both are accused of corruption. Both eventually get off, but not before being dragged into a lifetime of legal horror.
- [06:59]
William Drimple
The reason he goes to Bengal at all is because of the regulating act of 1773. Now, this is a really interesting time because it's the first time the East India Company is brought under the partial control of the Crown. And who do they turn to sort of, you know, birth this new baby? It's Impey. He takes it very seriously. He's not a man who does the job in half measures, is he's quite a serious, earnest kind of guy.
- [07:24]
Anita Arnan
In Calcutta High Court to this day, there is a spectacular picture of Impey as this enormous, plump, sort of Georgian. He looks like an Old Testament prophet.
- [07:36]
William Drimple
He looks like John Adams, actually. The portrait of John Adams that we saw. Sort of balding, wispy white hair, potato.
- [07:42]
Anita Arnan
Face, in the one in Calcutta High Court, though he's sort of standing with his hands raised as if sort of a priest about to make a sacrifice or something. Dustily bewigged, hands raised portentously above him like some sort of Hanoverian reincarnation of an Old Testament prophet.
- [08:00]
William Drimple
Yes, I mean, he sounds like sort of a colonial nightmare, but I mean, he was enamoured of his time in India. He loves it.
- [08:08]
Anita Arnan
That's right. And like Hastings, and unlike Clive in the generation before him, he is super impressed with the civilization of India, both the ancient Sanskritic Hindu culture. And we're going to hear more in the second half about another person in the circle who is Sir William Jones, who's the person who begins the study of Sanskrit and realizes it's one of the Indo European languages, but also the whole Muslim and Mughal world. And in fact, it is Urdu and Persian that Impi studies on his boat out. They all have these, you know, six month long voyages from England. And the more diligent among them don't just do skittles and bridge, gamble away their fortunes before they've made it. They learn the languages. And so Impi arrives, fluent in Bengali, Urdu and Persian by the time that he has turned up, which makes him.
- [08:59]
William Drimple
Rare, but does perhaps explain why he becomes friends with Claude Martin, who we talked about in the last episode, who was also an Indo file. So he does. I mean, this is actually happenstance, isn't it? He does go to stay with him in Lucknow in 1781. Is this the time where, you know, Martin goes, hey, do you want to see my etchings? That's exactly right. Is that where this romance with Indian art starts?
- [09:21]
Anita Arnan
And this particular set of etchings is the second? Remember I said how there'd been two sets of Claude Martin's commissions. First of all, he commissions the birds. And then at the end of his life, and indeed the end of last episode, finally we got to the fact that he's one of the great commissioners of flower painting and begins this whole tradition of East India Company sponsored botanical painting in India.
- [09:43]
William Drimple
And are these against the white background again? Are they sort of, you know, more portraits than pictures? I mean, what are we talking about?
- [09:50]
Anita Arnan
So what Impey does is he goes to stay with Claude Martin in Lucknow and we have, surviving in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, one picture that has the stamps of both men on the back. It's the missing link, if you like, between the two.
- [10:07]
William Drimple
What is it? What is it?
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Anita Arnan
It's a gorgeous Mogul iris. It's beautiful, beautiful painting.
- [10:12]
William Drimple
You would get plants in this episode. Okay, so, right, okay.
- [10:17]
Anita Arnan
It's a beautiful iris and it seems to have belonged initially to Martin and to be given to Elijah Impey. But what we also know is that Impey arrives with Warren Hastings while Martin's in the middle of this whole botanical moment. His house is full of Indian painters scribbling, copying flowers in this sort of half Mughal, half Enlightenment style. And Impy is particularly excited because as a middle aged, not particularly attractive man, he has married a much younger woman in a kind of Jane Austeny way. And his wife Mary is from Whitney in Oxfordshire. She is half his age. When she was 19, she married the 36 year old Elijah Impey and she was this absolute lover of nature. We have her childhood diaries when she's walking along the Windrush river in the Cotswolds, collecting salamanders and frogs and painting little sort of pictures of ducks feathers that she finds by the side of the Windrush. And when she comes out to India with Impi, she continues this on a massive scale.
- [11:27]
William Drimple
Well, I'm going to allow you, just because of her, because I'm slightly enamoured with her, to talk about animals for a while, even though this is all about gardens. But Lady Impeach, I mean, she does look like, you know, one of those Rosetti portraits. I mean, I imagine her hair to be red, although it's the black and white I'm looking at right now. But, you know, sort of a great cascade of curls, this very sort of long swan like neck, you know, very sort of porcelain skin. And these very intense eyes, clever eyes. It's a lovely portrait of a lovely looking woman.
- [11:55]
Anita Arnan
There's another picture of her which is by an Indian artist which is far more revealing. And what it is is it's an image of Lady Impi with all her Indian artists and household around her. And she's in the middle, I think she's choosing a hat. She's got a milliner, an Indian milliner who's brought her a variety of different hats to choose from and she's choosing one. But the artist has drawn the whole household with all these different people. Some sitting here making furniture, others sort of copying miniatures, others stitching gorgeous things or making chairs. It looks like an enormous workshop.
- [12:31]
William Drimple
I'm looking at it right now, I'm looking at the industry of it. And there she is sort of slightly, with the name Impy, impishly looking directly at the artist.
- [12:39]
Anita Arnan
And then the nicest thing is that there's also a picture of her children. And the Indian artist is sort of obviously horrified by the pale color of these white children of MP and Lady MP and they're almost ghosts. They're sort of albinos running around with these beautiful ayahs who are painted perfectly normally. And these children are painted literally white. They're kind of looking as if they've just been drained of all colour.
- [13:08]
William Drimple
Do you know that when I was describing the Lady Impey that I was describing, she found the coloured version of this, and it is attributed to Gainsborough, no less. So, I mean, you know, she was important enough and interesting enough for Gainsborough to be bothered to paint her. Now, the reason I'm going to allow you to talk about animals is because she had a rather spectacular menagerie, and that makes her even more interesting. Tell us about lady MPs menagerie.
- [13:30]
Anita Arnan
So, in the park, which is now commemorated by park street, though the park itself has almost completely disappeared, Lady Impey began to collect wonderful Indian animals. And I think her first was a shawl goat, which is one of these wonderful shaggy Himalayan goats with very long hair and wonderful horns. And the painting of that, which is probably the first to have been made, is in the V and A, and it's one of the masterpieces of their connection. And what happened is that when Impey went up to Lucknow to see Claude Martin got the idea of using Indian Mughal painters to paint botanical and zoological specimens. He got down from the old capital, Patna, which had briefly been next to one of the capitals of Bengal, three incredibly talented Indian artists who should be remembered, if there was any justice, as the greatest animal painters of Indian history. Alongside Mansoor. When we had this exhibition of Company school painting at the Wallace Collection five years ago, the Guardian art reviewer saw the picture of Sheikh Zain Al Din's Cheetah.
- [14:45]
William Drimple
Oh, yes.
- [14:46]
Anita Arnan
And said in his review that nothing that Stubbs had painted even began to match the brilliance of these pictures. And they are images of sheer genius. No one again, ever again painted pictures as gorgeous.
- [15:02]
William Drimple
We ought to name the three because, I mean, in your excitement, we haven't. So Sheikh Zain Al Din is one that you've mentioned, but there's also Bhagwani Das and Ram Dass, who are both Hindus. So these are Hindus and Muslims sort of working together on the same kind of project. Can I just say, the one that I am absolutely, absolutely in love with, though, is the great Indian fruit bat. That is just the most amazing, full of attitude, portrait of an animal. It's the bat with one wing outstretched and the other one coquettishly waving at the artist. So, you know. But again, such detail with a squirrel brush. Every hair on the torso of this bat, every expression is so beautifully captured, it's amazing.
- [15:43]
Anita Arnan
I thought when I saw it first that it looked like a sort of caped commendatore ushering a woman into a Venetian opera house or something.
- [15:51]
William Drimple
It's flirty. It's a flirty bat.
- [15:53]
Anita Arnan
It also has to be said It's a very male bat. The artist has made a point of drawing certain manner, the tackle of the bat.
- [16:01]
William Drimple
There are bits and bobs on display. Indeed. So, I mean, how many of these pictures? I mean, she had many animals. So is she the patron of zoological drawing as we sort of respect it now from company paintings?
- [16:15]
Anita Arnan
Yeah. This is the great masterpiece of this genre. No one ever again painted as beautifully. And when she died, this whole set of paintings were left to the Linnean Society, who at some point sold them off. And so they're split up now among collections around the world and they are some of the most expensive and sought after bits of Indian art anywhere. The fruit bat, the pear of that came up at auction a couple of years ago. The girl of this very male.
- [16:44]
William Drimple
Mrs. Bat.
- [16:45]
Anita Arnan
Mrs. Bat.
- [16:46]
William Drimple
Mrs. Bat, yes.
- [16:47]
Anita Arnan
And Mrs. Bat, I think, went for a third of a million pounds.
- [16:50]
William Drimple
Wow.
- [16:51]
Anita Arnan
And these were produced on a vast scale. There are two or three hundred surviving. The single best collection is the Ashmolean in Oxford. And last year, when I was living Oxford, I made a long advance appointment to get the whole lot out.
- [17:07]
William Drimple
Oh, how lovely, how lovely.
- [17:09]
Anita Arnan
So we spent a whole morning with me perched on a chair, peering down at these things, trying to photograph them from above to get perfect shots of them all.
- [17:18]
William Drimple
Lady Impey, then, and Lord Impey, were they the creators or enhancers of the park and therefore habitats for, you know, these animals and, you know, creating, if you like, their own supply of subjects to be painted? I mean, how much can we credit them for their ecology as well as being interested in this menagerie? I mean, were they green as we think of it today?
- [17:39]
Anita Arnan
Yes, I think they were. I think that this was their hobby, this is what they loved. And this, I think, united the two because we know that Impey was interested in particularly plants and we know that Lady Impey had been keeping a nature diary from her childhood. So this pair, who I think you know, were possibly, you know, slightly different generations, she was so much younger than him and she's an attractive and beautiful woman. And he's this old sort of pretentious old booby. They bonded as far as they did bond over their menagerie and their animal paintings. And what's lovely is that Lady Impi inscribes everyone not just in English but in Persian. She learnt the Persian letters, like her husband.
- [18:19]
William Drimple
Gosh.
- [18:20]
Anita Arnan
And so we know who painted each one of these paintings. There's a clear hierarchy. Sheikh Zainab gets to do all the really lovely fluffy mammals like the shawl, goats, while Bhavani Das gets given the reptiles and he, he has to do the kind of snakes and the salamanders and Ram Dass gets given the fish. And there's a wonderful collection of fish and insects now in the welcome Collection. Welcome Collection is free to use. Anyone who hears this podcast can go to the welcome Collection in London and demand to see the amazing Impi paintings by Bhuani Das and Ram Dass. And there are about two or three hundred in the welcome Collection.
- [18:58]
William Drimple
We are heading towards a break, but just before the break, I mean, were they recognised in their time as being so important to the art world or was it only centuries later?
- [19:07]
Anita Arnan
I think not. I'd love to say that they were appreciated and clearly Lady Impey took great pains to build up this collection and this was her passion project. But I think they were regarded as important records of beautiful and important birds and animals and plants rather than the artists themselves.
- [19:27]
William Drimple
Oh, how interesting, how interesting. Look, let's take a break and after the break, we've got some more really fascinating people to introduce you to.
- [19:37]
Anita Arnan
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- [20:45]
William Drimple
What's the best time of day to get a deal? All day with Jack in the box's all day big deal meal. You get to choose from four entrees like the supreme croissant and five tasty sides plus a drink starting at $5. So hurry in or take your time. You've got all day at Jack. Every bite's a big deal. Welcome back. So, William, are we going to another William for our next installment? And remember, it's about gardens. Did he like plants? William Jones of the Asiatic Society.
- [21:22]
Anita Arnan
William Jones, I'm glad to say, has quite a lot of other interests other than the garden plants and. No, he's a fascinating character. William Jones comes out on a boat called the Crocodile, and we should really have a whole episode on him another time, because he's one of the most important figures. So Jones arrives on the 15th of January, 1784. He's also part, like Impi, of the legal apparatus. He's setting up the courts with IMPI in Calcutta, and within a kind of couple of weeks of his arrival, he set up what he calls Society for inquiring into the history, civil and natural, the antiquities, arts, sciences and literature of Asia. And this becomes the Royal Asiatic Society, the Asiatic Society of Bengal in its first incarnation. Warren Hastings is the patron and soon arrives before the Society and declares, in truth, I love India little more than my own country.
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William Drimple
Oh, really? That's a good quote.
- [22:23]
Anita Arnan
And under this pair of Jones and Hastings, the Asiatic Society of Bengal quickly becomes a catalyst for channeling the scholars in the British community, of which there's very few compared to the number of people just out to make a lot of money. But they catalyze the curiosity of the entire community and they bring in Munshis and Indian members from the very beginning. And as Hastings puts it in his opening speech, he says, such studies, independent of utility, will diffuse the generosity of sentiment and will survive long after British dominion in India has ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power, a loss to remembrance.
- [23:05]
William Drimple
That's prescient, isn't it? That is prescient. I love that. So I also have another question. So, you know, with this sheer volume of material that's being created, I mean, particularly just through two families, you know, you've got the Martins and you've got the Impis. And now you've got William Jones in the mix as well. So, I mean, you seem to be describing quite a bookish, scholarly, you know, quite decent fellow, William Jones. How does he fit into the cutthroat mercantile world that Clive described as pretty despicable, you know, so rapacious. How does he exist in this world?
- [23:38]
Anita Arnan
Well, he doesn't. This is the lovely thing about him. He decamps quite early on to a place called Krishnagar, 60 miles up the Ganges from Calcutta, where he adopts the local Indian dress of loose white cotton and rents a bungalow that he describes as being entirely of vegetable materials. And he surrounds himself with Brahmins, who help him finish his study of Sanskrit, a language which he describes as being more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either. And as he begins to discover Sanskrit literature, which no one in Britain up to this point, the Brits have been in India, you know, a couple of hundred years now, and no one has bothered with this stuff. And suddenly he's now reading the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and he says, I'm in love with the Gopis. I'm charmed with Krishna, an enthusiastic admirer of Rama, Arjun, Bhima and the warriors of the Mahabharata. They appear far greater in my eyes than Ajax or Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad. So here we have the man who's pulling all this stuff together. And he goes down to the Ganges. He says, in paying adoration to springs and rivers, I'm going upstream to Ma Ganga, to the holy banks of the river Yamuna. He starts learning Hindustani airs, which are, you know, his attempt to try and make sense of Indian music. And what he realizes is that Valmiki is the new Homer, the Ramayana is the new Odyssey. And he makes this crucial breakthrough that they are alike in their lexicon to Greek and Latin. And it's he who first comes up with the idea of Indo European languages.
- [25:15]
William Drimple
He seems very enlightened. He's also a catalyst for great change because, you know, after Jones founds the Asiatic Society that comes into being, it's only two years later that the Calcutta Botanic Garden is founded by a Scottish soldier called Colonel Robert Kidd. So, you know, again, you've got a discipline that sort of springs out of the earth there. And in 1804, I mean, I love this sort of Wellesley. If all roads lead to Wellesley at some point, with the encouragement of the then Governor General, the Marquis of Wellesley, an institute for promoting the natural history of India is established outside Calcutta, Bharatpur. And what is that exactly? What is in this natural institute for promoting the natural history of India?
- [25:56]
Anita Arnan
So this is attached to the botanic gardens, and the botanic gardens are the other crucial place where this painting of plants is taking place. The first guy to found the botanic garden is a guy called James Kerr of Crummock, who's another Scotsman. He's originally a surgeon in Bengal, and he is sending pictures of Indian plants back to his naturalist friends in Scotland as early as 1773. And he seems to have used Bhowanidas and Ram Dass, maybe even before Lady Impey.
- [26:30]
William Drimple
Right.
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Anita Arnan
There's a couple of gorgeous images of a spray of unripe mangoes which my friend Henry Nolte discovered in the Kew Collection that seems to predate even the Impi. So there's all these Scots botanists out there and they're increasingly hanging out with either Brahmins or to learn Sanskrit or Mughal painters who are going to paint the botany. And you get this whole world, which is only a small portion of a very philistine city, but you get this science and literature and art all revolving around this circle that Jones has started.
- [27:11]
William Drimple
In park street because it is such a small circle. You know, everyone knows everybody and so therefore, you know, it's an even more fertile ground. You always find this, you know, sort of a salon culture exists and then there's an accelerated culture, if you like. You know, people sort of swapping ideas. Can I ask you one question? I've often wondered. These paintings that were done of plants and animals at this time, the company paintings, would they have been held in folios, in books, or would people have displayed them on walls? Because, I mean, they are excited. Exquisite. But would Lady Impey have been sitting on a huge pile of papers, if you like, or would they have been hung on her walls?
- [27:47]
Anita Arnan
I don't think she'd have hung them on her walls. I think they were done on loose leaves and then at a later date were bound. And today we have, in a sense, the undoing of this, because when these things come on the market, they tend to get broken and sold again as individual pieces, which now, as I said, go for a third of a million pounds apiece. So you have these artists coming down from the Mughal centres, particularly Moshidabad to the north and Patna to the west. And by the 1790s, it becomes a thing that you do. When you get to Calcutta, you employ one of these artists to paint, but other people use the artists to record their daily life. So you know them sitting at table, them going upstream in an Indian boat.
- [28:30]
William Drimple
It's like having a personal photographer, isn't it? It's just having somebody pap you every day of your life.
- [28:35]
Anita Arnan
And there are one or two characters that stand out. There's an amazing man called Major James Nathaniel Rind, and he is a zoologist and he paints particularly weird animals. And in the Met collection, there's a wonderful pair of images of flatfish. They look like sort of kippers, but again, in that Mogul style, every scale is painted and the Mogul artists almost can't help but give personality to these fish and to these beasts and birds and locusts and all these different things, and even a figure Like Marquis Wellesley. Richard Wellesley, who is far from an EC, commissions 27 volumes of natural history paintings.
- [29:20]
William Drimple
Ah. Which explains why, you know, he backs the Botanic garden and the Society. Okay, that's interesting. So his gateway drug was pictures. That's so interesting.
- [29:31]
Anita Arnan
And again, we. By studying these pictures, we can get some idea of the painters who actually painted them. And when we put the Forgotten Masters show together, there was one particular artist who had never been heard of before who sort of came to the fore. And Mulani Roy, who's this wonderful scholar working in the British Library, identified a Bengali painter called Khalouda. And Halu Dah paints with very few colors. He paints in black and white with the sort of Indian equivalent of a rotring pen almost. You know, there's very fine little ink work and every scale, every feather, every tuft of an animal's fur is shown. And my favorite is one that we had in the show, which was of a sloth bear.
- [30:18]
William Drimple
Oh, that's spectacular. That is a good one.
- [30:21]
Anita Arnan
Yeah. It looks as if he stepped on an electricity cable or something.
- [30:25]
William Drimple
He doesn't look happy. He doesn't look comfort. It's true. Yeah. Oh, how wonderful. So all of this Western patronage that is coming to these Indian painters, do we have any indication that people like Lady Impey or others say to their painters, I would like you to do it in this kind of style? Do they have a hand in an evolution of style?
- [30:50]
Anita Arnan
Clearly, someone is showing them European botanic gardens from that period, just like Claude Martin in Lucknow had showed Les Oiseaux de France to his artists. Clearly, in the botanic gardens, there are sets of Western botanical pictures, because you get the template of Western botanical painting, which is the white background, which is the highlighted individual flower removed almost sort of anesthetized from its context. When our friend Mansoor was painting his turkey, the turkey's in a landscape, or the flowers have butterflies on them. But the European style is isolated. And I think the sad thing, as you say, is that while the Europeans clearly liked these paintings and were prepared to spend large sums of money commissioning them, they didn't regard the artists as.
- [31:45]
William Drimple
Of great worth, of great masters, which they were clearly.
- [31:49]
Anita Arnan
The clearest example of this is in Delhi, where my wife's forebear, William Fraser, is commissioning huge numbers of masterpieces from the artists in the Mogul Court. And again, these paintings today go for half a million pounds, the best ones on the market. But we know from James Fraser's diaries that he regarded these pictures only as Polaroids, just like a photographer today will start when he's doing a shoot with test shots of the model or whatever it is. As far as James Fraser is concerned, these utter masterpieces, which are now worth a hundred times what his own pictures are worth. They were just setting the data of costume, of rank, of type for his own paintings. And he planned to do a whole series of lithographs in the manner of the Daniels, this uncle and nephew.
- [32:45]
William Drimple
Oh, I love the Daniels.
- [32:46]
Anita Arnan
Yeah, they're very much part of this world too.
- [32:48]
William Drimple
Well, we need to do an episode on the Daniels because I find that. Find them fascinating. Look, just very briefly, does this period of Company painting end with the end of the East India Company, when suddenly you have this sort of different revision of how the British should treat the natives? You know, all of these people who were involved in Company painting liked India, they talked about Sanskrit, they learned Persian, they dressed like Indians, they married Indians, some of them. But then you have this after the mutiny, 1854, you have this whole backlash against, you know what, we want to keep them at arm's length. We don't want them to get ideas above their station. Does the art guillotine at that point, too?
- [33:27]
Anita Arnan
It's a changing perspective in all these different ways. So you get the peak of it is really the 1780s is this period of Claude Martin, of Sir William Jones of Impey. And there is the period when you get the most intermarriage. At this period, about 1 in 3 Brits is married to or living with an Indian woman. At this period too, you're getting the most natural history painting taking place. But already by the 1820s, the number of marriages is going down. We know this from the wills which are in the India Office Library. And the style of the paintings is becoming less and less Mughal. And the painters are encouraged by become more and more European in their styles.
- [34:13]
William Drimple
Oh, it's a shame, isn't it? Because this hybrid was amazing.
- [34:17]
Anita Arnan
It is a shame. And you can see this in a single individual's work. There's a wonderful, brilliant painter called Sitar Ram who brings this story in a sense, to a conclusion. And at the beginning, when he's a young man, he's painting very detailed, micro Mughal style of locusts or insects. And he's been commissioned to produce these natural history paintings in the Mogul style. And then he is watching clearly what European artists like James Fraser are doing and how they're getting paid far more to produce works in a European style. So Sita Ram, over the course of his career, alters his style and begins to paint in A quasi European way, and becomes less and less Mughal. He could do the Mughal stuff, and in his youth he did it. But he. Whether by personal choice or by just realizing where the money was.
- [35:13]
William Drimple
Economic compulsion.
- [35:15]
Anita Arnan
Yeah, economic compulsion. He begins to paint more. And he accompanies the Marquis Hastings, who's different from Warren Hastings. The Marquis Hastings is a later governor general who goes up the Ganges and the Yamuna and visits Delhi in the 1820s, 1830s. And some of his pictures looks almost like Turner. He's sort of channeling that early 19th century fascination with light and washes of color. And there's a famous picture, I think, that's marking the defeat of Napoleon. It must have been 1815. And appropriately enough, it's an image of Claude Martin's Constantia, where we started the first episode of this little miniseries. And it's the Treaty of Amiens. And there are fireworks and lights all around the lake in front of Constantia and in front of the obelisk that was raised in Martin's memory. And it's all just a wash of color with lights exploding.
- [36:10]
William Drimple
So very Turner. Very Turner.
- [36:12]
Anita Arnan
And that is the future. Indian artists are encouraged not to paint in their own style, but the next generation, you get John Lockwood Kipling coming out to Lahore and starting the first Imperial art school in what, 1870s, 1880s, and people are being trained to paint like pre Raphaelites and right up to the present day, when you go to the Delhi Art Fair today, people are looking over their shoulder. Not at Mansoor or Sheikh Zaynuddin, they're looking over their shoulder to Damien Hirst or to Picasso or whatever. And I think it's only in Pakistan, with the Academy of Painting, that's grown up at the art school in Lahore that's produced artists like Shahzia Sikanda, that we've begun to find South Asian artists looking back to Indian inspiration, to the indigenous traditions of Indian art. And that has to be the future. That is the stuff that really interests me.
- [37:09]
William Drimple
Well, listen, well done for mentioning plants at least a few times in this episode. That's all we've got time for. Join us again next time when we are going to be talking a lot about plants and gardens.
- [37:22]
Anita Arnan
Anita, being the good head girl, has done her homework and two episodes for.
- [37:27]
William Drimple
You, and then it was absolutely plant crazy. Yeah, yeah. This is going to be plant tastic. This is the story of a really unknown man, Herman Gustav Krombegel, who is the Maharaja's gardener. It's a really cracking story, and I've just loved researching it anyway, till the next time we meet, it is goodbye from me, Anita Arnan, and goodbye from me, William Durimple.