Forgotten Masters :Indian Painting for the East India Company
Forgotten Masters :Indian Painting for the East India Company
hardback
Published:
28 November, 2019
Description
Published to coincide with the first UK exhibition of these masterworks at The Wallace Collection, Forgotten Masters celebrates the work of a series of extraordinary Indian artists.
As the East India Company extended its sway across India in the late eighteenth century, many remarkable artworks were commissioned by Company officials from Indian painters who had previously worked for the Mughals. Each had their own style, tastes and agency, and all of them worked for British patrons between the 1770s and the bloody end of the Mughal rule in 1857.
Edited by writer and historian William Dalrymple, these hybrid paintings explore both the beauty of the Indian natural world and the social realities of the time in one hundred masterpieces, often of astonishing brilliance and originality. They shed light on a forgotten moment in Anglo-Indian history during which Indian artists responded to European influences while keeping intact their own artistic visions and styles.
These artists represent the last phase of Indian artistic genius before the onset of the twin assaults - photography and the influence of western colonial art schools - ended an unbroken tradition of painting going back two thousand years. As these masterworks show, the greatest of these painters deserve to be remembered as among the most remarkable Indian artists of all time.
More Details
| Type | Book |
|---|---|
| ISBN13 | 9781781301012 |
| ISBN10 | 1781301018 |
| Number Of Pages | 192 |
| Item Weight | 1380 g |
| Product Dimensions | 248 x 280 x 28 mm |
| Publisher / Reseller | Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd |
| Format | hardback |
Media Reviews
The book accompanying the exhibition is far more than just a catalogue….this [is] the best and most handsome book on the subject currently available. -- Peter Parker * Literary Review *
He does a sensitive, subtle job of reframing the argument by focusing attention back on the artists, who fashioned a captivating hybrid style that drew on European and Mughal models. -- Alastair Sooke * The Daily Telegraph *
Author's Bio
William Dalrymple is guest curator of the exhibition Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company at the Wallace Collection. Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. In 2013 he co-curated the exhibition, Princes and Painters in Late Mughal Delhi 1739-1857, with Yuthika Sharma at the Asia Society in New York. In 2018, he was presented with the President’s Medal by The British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. William lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.