226. The Rise and Fall of East India Company Painting (Ep 2)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arland. And me, William Drumpel. 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 of the preamble, even for you. It's a fair criticism. 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, Mata on one side and a man called Sir Elijah Impey on the other.

1:16So, Willie, just like we did with Lucknow and we painted a picture of this great Rome of India, the magnet of all artists, music, all high culture. What was Calcutta like in the 1700s, around about the same time? So Calcutta was an extraordinary mess, is 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? That's brilliant.

1:54No, 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. He says... Well, that's saying something, yeah. Calcutta is one of the most wicked places in the universe, rapacious and luxurious beyond conception. Well, that's something on TripAdvisor. Even Robert Clive found this a little too much.

2:36So, 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? 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 in a matter of months, then lost in a minute at a wager at the whist table. And death was always there.

3:18Someone 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. It's a brilliant picture you painted. But I'm just reminding you, this is a series about gardens. Now, in a place that is so unplanned and chaotic, one assumes that actually parks and gardens and that kind of thing is not foremost in people's minds in Calcutta. 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.

4:05And the Park Street, which is at the centre of Calcutta to this day, where I went to a literary festival last week in Calcutta at Park Street, and where South Park Street's 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 ever go - Another local lad. We're just doing all the local references. Southwest London. You go to Hammersmith and get stuck on that terrible roundabout.

4:41You 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, there's got a spy you can see. Yes, yes, yes. Well, there's your grumbling about the traffic. Yes, I do. There's your grumbling about the traffic and stuck. Well, Elijah Impey's 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.

5:18And 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. The old boy network again. The 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. The reason he goes to Bengal at all is because of the Regulating Act of 1773.

6:04Now 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 to sort of birth this new baby? It's Impey. He takes it very seriously. He's not a man who does the job in half measures. He's quite a serious, earnest kind of guy. 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. He looks like John Adams, actually, the portrait of John Adams. Balding, wispy white hair, potato 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.

6:51Dustily bewigged, hands raised portentously above him like some sort of Hanoverian reincarnation of an Old Testament prophet. Yes. I mean, he sounds like sort of a colonial nightmare, but I mean, he was enamored of his time in India. He loves it. That's right. And like Hastings, and unlike Clive and 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 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.

7:35and in fact it is Urdu and Persian that Impi studies on his boat out. They all have these 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 rare but does perhaps explain why he becomes friends with Claude Martin who we talked about in the last episode, who was also an Indophile. So he does, I mean, this is actually happenstance, isn't it? He does go to stay with him in Lucknow in 1781.

8:13Is this the time where, you know, Martin goes, hey, do you want to see my etchings? Is that where this romance with Indian art starts? 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 paintings and begins this whole tradition of East India Company-sponsored botanical painting in India. And are these against the white background again?

8:45Are they sort of, you know, more portraits than pictures? I mean, what are we talking about? 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. What is it? What is it? It's a gorgeous mogul iris. It's a beautiful, beautiful painting. You would get plants in this episode. My God. Okay. It's a beautiful iris. And it seems to belong initially to Martijn 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.

9:31His house is full of Indian painters scribbling away, copying flowers in this sort of half Mughal, half Enlightenment style. And Impey is particularly excited because as a middle-aged, not particularly attractive man, he has married a much younger woman in a kind of Jane Austen-y 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.

10:21And when she comes out to India with Impi, she continues this on a massive scale. Well, I'm going to allow you just because of her, because I'm slightly enamored with her to talk about animals for a while, even though this is all about gardens. But Lady Impi, 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 a 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.

10:54There'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 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 it is an enormous workshop.

11:30I'm looking at it right now. I'm looking at the industry of it. And there she is, sort of slightly with the name Impishly, looking directly at the artist. 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 colour of these white children of MP and Lady MP. And they're almost ghosts. They're sort of albinos running around with these beautiful eyes 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. 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.

12:14So, I mean, you know, she was important enough and interesting enough for Gainsborough to be bothered to paint. And 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 Impey's menagerie. 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.

12:49And the painting of that, which is probably the first to have been made, is in the V &A, and it's one of the masterpieces of their collection. And what happened is that when Impey went up to Latina 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 Zaynaldin's cheetah and said in his review that nothing that Stubbs had painted even began to match the brilliance of these pictures.

13:54And they are images of sheer genius. No one again, ever again painted pictures as gorgeous. We ought to name the three because I mean, in your excitement, we haven't. So Sheikh Zayn al-Din is one that you've mentioned, but there's also Bhawani Das and Ram Das, 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 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 out, stretched, and the other one coquettishly waving at the artist.

14:32So, you know, again, such detail with a squirrel brush, every hair on the torso of this bat, every expression is so beautifully captured. It's amazing. I thought when I saw it first, it looked like a sort of caped commendatory ushering a woman into a Venetian opera hat or something. It's flirty. It's a flirty bat. It also has to be said it's a very male bat. The artist has made a point of drawing in no uncertain manner the tackle of the bat. 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?

15:14Yeah, 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 Linnaean 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 pair of that came up at auction a couple of years ago. The girl of this very male. Mrs. Bat. Mrs. Bat. Mrs. Bat, yes. And Mrs. Batt, I think, went for a third of a million pounds. Wow. And these were produced on a vast scale.

15:52There are 200 or 300 surviving. The single best collection is the Ashmolean in Oxford. And last year, when I was living in Oxford, I made a long advance appointment to get the whole lot out. Oh, how lovely. How lovely. 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. Lady Impey then and Lord Impey, were they the creators or enhancers of the park and therefore habitats for these animals and 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?

16:36I mean, were they green as we think of it today? 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 Impe inscribes everyone, not just in English, but in Persian.

17:16She learnt the Persian letters. Like her husband. Gosh. And so we know who painted each one of these paintings. There's a clear hierarchy. Sheikh Zaynuddin gets to do all the really lovely fluffy mammals like the shore goat, while Bawani Das gets given the reptiles. And 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. The 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 Bhwani Dass and Ram Dass.

17:55And there are about 200 or 300 in the Welcome Collection. 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? 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. 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.

18:38Welcome back. So, William, are we going to another William for our next instalment? And remember, it's about gardens. Did he like plants? William Jones of the Asiatic Society. William Jones, I'm glad to say, has quite a lot of other interests other than the garden plants. And 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 Impey, of the legal apparatus. He's setting up the courts with Impey in Calcutta.

19:20And within a couple of weeks of his arrival, he's set up what he calls a 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 a little more than my own country. Really? That's a good quote. 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.

20:03But they catalyze the curiosity of the entire community. And they bring in Munchies 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 are lost to remembrance. That's prescient, isn't it? That is prescient. I love that. So I also have another question. So with this sheer volume of material that's being created, I mean, particularly just through two families, you've got the Martins and you've got the Impeys, and now you've got William Jones in the mix as well.

20:47So, I mean, you seem to be describing quite a bookish, scholarly, quite decent fellow. William Jones. How does he fit into the cutthroat, mercantile world that Clive described as pretty despicable and rapacious? How does he exist in this world? 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 Gandhys 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 to 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 but 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 mahabarata and the ramayan and he says, I'm in love with the gopis.

21:51I'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 together. And he goes down to the Ganges. He says, in paying adoration to springs and rivers, I'm going upstream to Marganga to the holy banks of the river Yamuna. He starts learning Hindustani airs, which is 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.

22:38It's he who first comes up with the idea of Indo-European languages. 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 Marcus of Wellesley, an institute for promoting the natural history of India is established outside Calcutta, Bharatpur.

23:16What is that exactly? What is in this natural institute for promoting the natural history of India? 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 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 Bhawanidas and Ramdas maybe even before Lady Impey. 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.

24:08So 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 in Park Street. Because it is such a small circle, everyone knows everybody. And so therefore, it's an even more fertile ground. You always find this, a salon culture exists, and then there's an accelerated culture, if you like, people sort of swapping ideas.

24:52Can I ask you one question? I often wondered, these paintings that were done of plants and animals at this time, the company paintings, would they have been held in folios and books or would people have displayed them on walls? Because I mean they are 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? 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 it, which now, as I said, go for a third of a million pounds apiece.

25:31So you have these artists coming down from the Mughal Center, 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 lives. So, you know, them sitting at table, them going upstream in an Indian boat. It's like having a personal photographer, isn't it? It's just having somebody tip-pap you every day of your life. And there are one or two characters that stand out. There's an amazing man called Major James Nathaniel Rind.

26:09And 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 Marquess Wellesley, Richard Wellesley, who is far from an easy, commissions 27 volumes of natural history paintings. Ah, which explains why, you know, he backs the Botanic Garden and the society. Okay, that's interesting.

26:52So his gateway drug was pictures. That's so interesting. And again, 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 Malini Roy, who's this wonderful scholar working in the British Library, identified a Bengali painter called Haludar. And Haludar paints with very few colours. He paints in black and white with the sort of Indian equivalent of a rotaring pen almost. You know, there's very fine little ink work.

27:34And every scale, every feather, every tuft of an animal's fur is shown. And my favourite is one that we had in the show, which was of a sloth bear. Oh, that's spectacular. That is a good one. Yeah. It looks as if he stepped on electricity cables up there. Yeah. He doesn't look happy. Every hair is standing. He doesn't look comfortable. 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?