225. Painting the Empire: Art of the East India Company (Ep 1)

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durimple. You're doing that thing of leaning right in and bellowing at people. Just chill, man. There we go. God's sake. Just, you know what? I'm very excited. You're full of vim and vigor because you've come off a flight and you've just had such fun telling me who you were sitting next to. So who are you sitting next to on the flight that just got in? Well, I have to say, I didn't recognize him. And he was sort of under a baseball cap, sort of hiding his face. Was it Farrell? Was it the musical supremo known as Farrell? It was Ed Sheeran.

1:05Ed Sheeran was off to play a gig in all places in Bhutan. Really? So if you're listening to this episode, not Ed, but anyone else that happens to be in Bhutan, the improbable gig coming your way is Ed Sheeran. Did you not charm him? Did you not tell him all about the Empire podcast? What's wrong with him? Well, I have to say it didn't look as if, A, he was particularly wanting a very long conversation at seven in the morning or five in the morning UK time this morning when we got into Delhi, any more than the day before my other little celeb spot of having. Wait a minute. So are you saying to me, you just saw Ed Sheeran on a float?

1:41This is very different to the story I anticipated. You said you sat next to him. I imagined like a whole wine dine. Oh, Ed, your musical stylings are so very good. I thought you'd do that. You know, just dazzle him with your musical knowledge. I did do a little bit of job. You looked at him, did you? What did you say? You get the impression that he was a keen listener of the Empire podcast or indeed a reader of my oeuvres. Oh, really, Ed? If you're friends with Ed Sheeran, tell him he missed out on a treat. He could have had a chat with one of the most entertaining men in the world. I did my best to dazzle him with my charm, but I have to say that he didn't disappear into his iPods and his baseball cap.

2:23He could have been regaled with your tales and knowledge of popular culture. But the air hostesses were very excited. And there was lots of autograph hunting by the entire cabin crew. I cut you off in your oeuvre. Who was the other guy you saw yesterday? Well, the day before, I was probably at Davos giving a talk there. And I was being interviewed on a fire escape, actually. It was outside. Glamour. And it was a nice, bright spot to do an interview that was very quiet. Until this sort of entourage came thundering through the middle of the interview, in the head of which was another than David Beckham.

3:00And I can exclusively reveal he has a lot more tats on his neck than you ever see on telly. You could possibly imagine. Very heavily tattooed. You heard it here first, listeners. All breaking news. This is very, very good. We don't normally do celeb gossip on EmpirePod. Yes, we do. Who are you kidding? If we ever see him, we talk about them. We're that desperate. And also dazzled. Look, right, concentration, bags of hush now, because we are here to talk about a brilliant and rather surprising moment in art history when the East India companies wished to record animals and plants of this new land that they were conquering with gay abandon led to the recruitment of some of the best artists in India at the time to illustrate flora, fauna, animals they'd only dreamt of or heard of.

3:53And the result is this wonderful hybrid art that is called Company School Painting. And you are a massive fan. I mean, you are, you know, even more than Ed Sheeran's work, you're a fan of the company painting. I'm rather more of a fan of Company School Painting than I am Ed Sheeran. Or indeed David Beckham. I would swap the complete works of Beckham and Sheeran for a couple of very nice Company School paintings. Okay. So what is it and why are you so fascinated by it? So, first of all, I think the term Company School Painting does it a disservice because it makes it sound like it's sort of produced by the East India Company.

4:27And what actually is happening is something much more interesting. In the process of trying to find commercially viable plants to sell, and of course, in the story of this, the most commercially viable thing the East India Company latches onto is opium and the opium poppies, and also rubber. There's a whole variety of fortunes to be made for the company by taking an interest. So the East India Company, obviously, at its heart is a commercial company, and it didn't primarily exist to conquer land. It primarily existed to find things to trade. And part of those things that it traded was plants and animals, as we talked with Satnam Sanghera in our last couple of episodes.

5:09And in order to find things to sell from the plant and botanical world, the East India Company recruits a whole lot of very uncommercially minded botanists who leap on the chance to be sent out to India, which is the exclusive preserve of the East India Company. You can't just go off and collect plants in 18th century India. You have to have an East India Company passport, and they're very jealously guarded. And so you find this group of enthusiasts for botany coming out of Oxford and particularly out of Edinburgh University, where there's a huge botanical movement going on. And these guys find themselves in India, and then they have to have their plants illustrated.

5:49Today, you just take out your cell phone and photograph the plants, or possibly do a proper studio shoot with amazing cameras and lighting. But the equivalent of that in the 18th century was to find existing brilliant Mughal artists. And we talked in the Mughal series all about how among the many wonders of Mughal art were the botanical pictures done by Mansur at the court of Jahangir. There was a tradition in India of painting animals. One of the other things I did between meeting Messrs. Beckham and Sheeran and getting back to my farm was going to the Mughal show at the Victoria and Albert Museum and seeing, for the first time actually, many of those Mansell pictures since we actually did the episode.

6:40I've only ever seen them as illustrations and they had almost a whole room of the turkey, the zebra, a wonderful blue bull I'd never seen before, a nil guy. So what the company does is that these botanists recruit people from that tradition, but also painters who are used to painting other things too, like there's whole groups of painters on the Andra coast who paint textiles and do lovely patterns and these famously beautiful Indian textiles of scrolls of plants and so on. I was going to ask you, because people won't know. You know this backwards, forwards, and you do light up in a way that is phenomenal, like a firework when you talk about company paintings.

7:19But there are different styles. We've talked about the Mughal style, but there is also a Punjabi style, a Bahari style, which Bahari meaning from the mountains, a Tamil style. I mean, every part of India has a different sensibility towards art now as well. And so the company doesn't just draw from those Mansour school painters. They go and they seek out all the styles, don't they? Exactly right. And that's why I have always been rather unsure about the phrase company school painting. And when I did an exhibition of these paintings at the Wallace Collection called Forgotten Masters four years ago, just in the middle of lockdown, we produced this show.

7:55We never used the phrase company school painting. It was Indian painting for the East India Company. Which is so much better because company school suggests one style, one approach, and it isn't. It's a collection. What I also love about this, what you've told me about company school painting, is that it is actually quite a democratising process in art because they do go to the court painters. So you've got the very grand imperial painters like Gullah Malikhan, for example. But you also get to the very humble muchis who were leather workers, who were deemed to be at that time untouchables, who today are called Dalits.

8:32So, I mean, that would have been unthinkable in a court to have people from that caste and class painting in any meaningful way. But the company sought them out if they were good. And the company is very utilitarian. If these guys are capable of producing good likenesses of the plants or botany or the animal specimens which they're meant to be painting. then they're employed. And so you get a vast variety of different sorts of painting happening in different botanic gardens. So the ones around Delhi are obviously very much more in a Mughal style, straightly representational. The sort of thing you're getting on the coast of Andhra Pradesh, where the local tradition of painting is painting scrolls and textiles, is far more sort of imaginative.

9:13And, you know, the plants are made to almost do a dance across the page, with their scrolls going off in an improbable direction. It's a completely different approach to that in Delhi. I mean, the other democratisation is that the company is not an entity that commissions these things. It's people working for the East India Company. So you can get people from all tiers saying, do you know, I quite fancy a picture of a tiger? Or I quite like that plant growing at the foothills of that particular mountain. And so you have people from very different walks of life. I mean, soldiers, civil servants, diplomats, missionaries, judges, women.

9:48I mean, you know, they get a say as well. Women. Even the women get in on the act. But they all commission. And so that's why company painting is as vibrant and diverse as it is. What's interesting is that a lot of these enthusiastic botanists are sensitive enough to, for example, take an interest in the painters who are painting for them. They develop relationships. And so far more than in the art that precedes it, you're often aware of the identity of the painter. And they have a biography, they have a name. And so one of the things we tried to do in this exhibition was to group this material under the names of the different artists who produced it.

10:30And that shouldn't be a revolutionary thing. There's not one, but two exhibitions that you've put together, one in New York and one in London, where you've curated and collected these things. I mean, you're saying that's what we tried to, you not mentioned what you did, mate. So these were like two major exhibitions of company work. One of the nicest jobs I've ever had was pulling all this stuff together. First of all, was the one in New York, which is specifically about the art of Delhi called Princes and Painters. And then there was the one in the Wallace Collection more recently, which was from all over India.

11:02And that was called Forgotten Masters, Indian painting for the East India Company. And particularly the Wallace Collection show was beautifully designed by the museum with gorgeous colours. And we had rooms for the different painters. And today we kind of assume that when we open a history of art book that painting in the West is grouped by artists. So you have the pre-Raphaelites with Byrne Jones and Rossetti, and you have the great Renaissance artists, whether it's Michelangelo or Leonardo or Raphael or whoever. And that is not the case often with the art of India. Often they just say Pahari.

11:41There's just a school called Pahari Painting where there's a lot of work done from an area. But the artists are not given identities or agencies. And this isn't just being sort of woke and right on. It's obviously vital, if you're trying to understand what's going on, to understand the artists who are producing this in the backgrounds they come from and what's driving them. And so we worked out these extraordinary relationships between painters who were often trained to paint grand court scenes, images of nawabs holding court with noblemen grouped around them, or maybe watching dancing girls or doing courtly things.

12:16and here they are later in their lives being hired by the East Indy Company to paint usually botanical scenes, sometimes birds, beasts, reptiles, snakes, but also sort of local oddities. So there's a wonderful set of paintings called The Sheep Eater of Fatiga, who was a sadhu who was famous for sort of disemboweling sheeps and eating the whole thing from top to bottom. And the company officers were clearly fascinated by this sort of guy who performed this apparently almost as a sort of circus trick. And people commissioned lots of pictures of him disemboweling the sheep. And among the pictures, which we get at this time, are these very democratic images of Indian village scenes, sometimes done for colonial reasons.

13:01In other words, these are taxpayers whose identities the company wants to know. So you get the painterly equivalent of mug shots of villagers. But this is the first pictures in Indian art, certainly since maybe a junta in about sort of 100 BC, where you're getting ordinary villagers being painted with all their sort of warts and all. One of them's lost an eye and others had smallpox. It's marvellous. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of the difference between those mannered photos from Victorian times of people sort of staring in the camera with deadness in their eyes. And then you've got those sort of Victorian street scenes where, you know, the early documenters of life are sort of taking these huge daguerreotypes of streets rather than a person.

13:40And they tell you so much more. Now, look, I want to go back really to the start of all of this, because it is the late 1700s that you have artists who are flooding into the city of Lucknow. Now, Lucknow, at this time, in the late 1700s, was at the height of the Golden Age. It was known as the, what is it, the Monte Carlo, the Venice? I mean, it's the Rome of India. I've heard all sorts of different descriptions for it. Or possibly a bit of 1970s Tehran and Monte Carlo crossed with a bit of Las Vegas and maybe a bit of blindborn. So it was an artist's magnet. And part of the reason, I think it's really important to understand why artists were sort of flooding into Lucknow, it's because the other major Mughal city, Delhi, had been looted and burned a few times.

14:25It was a poor, benighted place. And so people really didn't have enough time to get the palettes out, let alone start painting. So they all head to Lucknow, which is this nurturer of talent, a place that appreciates art and beauty, its reputation, even now actually is linked with finesse. Lucknowi Punjabi, so Punjabi is a language I speak, is the sweetest form of Punjabi. It's very mannered. You go to Punjabi, it sounds like you're having a fight. I can say this, I'm Punjabi. But you go to other parts of Punjabi and it's a very different sort of brusque language. But the Lucknow Punjabi and the Lucknow culture was high art, high living, high manners.

15:04And this is the place really, it's the sort of the nursery for much of what will become company art. Absolutely right. And there's this famous culture of the Tawafs, who we would call the courtesans, who in the culture of the time were much, much more. They were the school of manners. And people sent their teenage sons off to the Kutis of the Tawafs. And there they would learn the art of courtly living, how to make conversation to women, how to pass upon, how to recite poetry, when to recite poetry. And the Nawabs were, on one hand, regarded, I think, as terrifically decadent, particularly by the British.

15:47But on the other, were regarded as people that spent their vast fortunes on art, on dance, on music. and they also attracted it as always is the case if you have patrons who are open-fisted and are throwing money around at artists they produce a town around them which is like you know Florence in the early 1400s or equivalents you know the Netherlands at the time of Rembrandt or whatever it is and there is an extraordinary amount of music of painting and of high civilization coming out of this. And it's a place where Europeans and Indians mix on an equal footing in a way that's just not happening in the most of the rest of India.

16:34And when they do mix, they are impressed rather than sort of looking down on the natives, as you say, there's a reason to sort of look up. The British correspondent, the very famous journalist, William Russell, writes of his time in Lucknow as, not Rome, not Athens, not any city I have ever scene appears to me so striking and beautiful as this. So, you know, it isn't that sort of, you know, the kind of Orientalism that makes us all go, which is, you know, oh, look, isn't it exotic, but slightly lower than us. It is an admiration that's going on. Yes. And people are passing in the sense culturally in both directions.

17:08On one hand, the Nawab sometimes amazed British visitors as turning up dressed in the uniform of a British admiral or even a clergyman of the church. But at the same time, you have all these pictures of all these fabulous nabobs, you know, throwing away their East India Company breaches and dressing in long Avadi gowns, lying back on carpets, hookers in their mouths as they're watching Norch girls. And, you know, there's all sorts of reasons you can be down on this, but it's rather a marvellous place. You've used two terms that we ought to explain. So the nabobs are kind of the nobility, the people with the money, the people with the bling, the people with the cash who are native Indians.

17:45The Nawabs are the governors. They're the Mughal governors. They're the rulers. But the Nabob is a term that's given to white men who have come over to India who have, to use the term, gone native, who've sort of started fraternizing, falling in love with, having children with, and living a little bit too Indian, as the East India Company will eventually start feeling. But at the beginning, it happens. Now, tell us about some of the really interesting people in this company painting story. I mean, there's a whole world of strange Europeans who've come to Lucknow to make their fortunes. And these are not just sort of, you know, men.

18:18There are two British mensabs who end up marrying the Nawabs. Bizarrely, there's one of the most beautiful mosques in Lucknow turns out to have been built for a British woman who converted to Islam and married the Nawab. And it's sitting there on the edge of the British residence, a woman called Miss Walters, who got sort of sucked into this world. And there is a wonderful character at the heart of the British end of this city. This is around the residency building and a wonderful character, one of my favorite East India Company officers called Major William Palmer. And a portrait survives probably by Zoffany, although art historians occasionally sort of have long debates about this.

18:58and it's one of the most famous pictures of the time because it is the very antithesis of the kind of curzon racist uh rajee world that we're so familiar with in this picture palmer is sitting on a chair and he is gazing with love and adoration at his incredibly beautiful wife who's a wonderful woman called Faiz Begum, who's a kind of mogul princess, who is sitting below him. She's sitting on the floor. He's sitting on a chair. But she has on her lap her newborn baby boy with a little Muslim cap on his head. Two other children are looking in at the baby in their Lucknavi gowns. Faiz's sister is sitting the far side of her brother-in-law.

19:49There are Ayahs. and it's just a very charming image of a happy mixed-race family from the mid-18th century, which you just, you don't imagine. You don't expect and you don't, but the other thing that's really striking about it is that the structure of the painting or rather the arrangement of the painting is very much reminds me of those ones with the adoration of the baby Jesus. The child, this mixed-race child is the most important thing in the painting. So again, the stigma of having a mixed race relationship or what they would become known as mongrel children, that stigma is nowhere to be seen in this picture because the radiance is coming from the mother and the mixed race child.

20:27Except, you know, it looks like the adoration of the baby. You've got sort of palm trees and exotic plants in the background, you know, and the man in the chair is wearing a very smart Western European suit. So yes, that's fantastic. Zophany, you mentioned Zophany that you think it's Zophany. Tell me, am I right? Is there a really dark story? Or am I imagining it over Zophany? There is a dark story and it is true. Zophany has the distinguishing mark of being the only Royal academician that we know definitely to have been a cannibal. That we know for sure. Wait a minute. We have suspicions about a number of Yes, I mean, they look like they could.

21:09But what did he do? Why did Zoffany eat somebody? Who did he eat? I mean, there's so many questions. I remember a rumor, but just put some flesh on the bones of his story, would you? So, Zoffany is part of this extraordinary circle of Brits and Europeans, of which there are a great variety, who are attracted by the Nawab's wealth and come to try and make their fortunes. And Zoffany, when he goes out to India, is still a struggling painter. By the time he comes back, he's an established master who knows that when he hits England, he'll be able to command great prices and already have a network of admirers because of the extraordinary work he's produced in Lucknow.

21:48But what he doesn't expect is that he is shipwrecked on the way home. And it's like one of those stories of, you know, planes going down in the Andes and they end up having to eat the dead passengers and that sort of stuff. This is the same thing. in order to survive, they end up eating a second lieutenant who's… Oh, my God. It's just awful. I shouldn't laugh. It's awful. And he's buried not very far from where we both live in West London. He's on Kew Green. Very appropriate for this story. He's in Anne's church. Just outside Kew Gardens. Oh, my goodness. Well, I'm going to go and have a look at that.

22:22Right. So, that's the cannibal painter. Okay. Tell me about another of, as it happens, Major Palmer's friends, because I love the sound of Colonel Antoine Poullier. Tell me about Antoine Poullier. Poullier is another wonderful character. He's painted by Zoffany. There's one wonderful Zoffany, which I actually saw in Calcutta a fortnight ago. It's now up in the Victoria Memorial Museum. And at the centre of the picture is Zoffany painting away. And he's flanked by two friends. And we're going to talk about both of them. Poullier is the first. He's sitting there with a sort of beaver skin hat on.

22:56He looks like he's come out of sort of Davy Crockett. Exactly, he does. That's on his head. And yet on his sort of shoulders is, you know, a very stiff East India Company jacket. And he's all dressed up with, you know, the full cravat and everything else you'd expect. And a particularly memorable pair of moustaches, what was called Marlboros in the 18th century. Anyway, Paulier is part of this world. And he is one of the very first Europeans to commission serially work from Lucknow artists. And he is fascinated by the art of the Mughals. And we have a whole range of his correspondence, which is now in Paris in the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he corresponds with Mughal painters.

23:36Actually, these are almost the only letters in existence from patrons to Mughal artists. He can be quite peremptory at times, you know, go to Delhi, paint me the court, come back immediately. And there's no question that he's the boss. But at other times, he is clearly in love with this whole world of Mughal painting. and a great specialist and connoisseur in it. And his collection is now split up between London and Paris and Vienna. And he makes the decision, like Zoffany, to go back to Europe. But in his case, he chooses exactly the wrong time to go and buy a chateau in France with his earnings from the Noirs because he buys a chateau in France in 1787, which adds your historical imagination.

24:22Hang on a minute, just worked it out. So the man who lost his head over Indian painting and culture ends up losing his head? He goes to guillotine. A guillotine. He, like his friend Major Palmer, fell in love with not one, but two Indian wives. I mean, he had two, isn't that right? A junior and a senior? And they're constantly squabbling. And their correspondence, I once went to the Archive de Savoie in France and got out the correspondence of many of this circle, which are kept there in the archives of a guy called General de Bois. And General de Bois is left with these two squabbling ones when Folier goes back.

25:01And there are reams of correspondence about the two women sort of continuing their catfight over the next 10 years. But the key character who is at the centre of this whole network, the reason that Paulier and Zoffany are there and that they know each other, is the most important character of all. And this is a man called Claude Mata, famous today because he set up two schools which still exist, the La Martiniere schools. A very posh school, in fact. It's sort of an Aiton Harrow type thing. Exactly, in the Indian context. The Lucknow School still survives as a school to this day, and it's in the building he built as a sort of, at once, a mausoleum, a fortress, and a centre of operations.

25:45and it was originally called Constantia. It's now known as Lama Tinias. And on the facade are two fantastic East India Company lions, which are about three or four times life-size. And they have behind the eyes of the lions spaces so that you could put flaming torches into the eye sockets and light them up. So these wonderful lions would be sort of a flame with flames coming out of their mouths and eyes. And Claude Martin was born in Lille in 1735. At 16, he signs up for the Compagnie des Andes, the French East India Company. He makes a first fortune as a sort of buccaneer businessman and an indigo planter.