CIRCLE OF THE IMPEY ARTISTS, CALCUTTA, INDIA, CIRCA 1780-1810 AD

This painting combines features associated with some of the most celebrated albums of Company School natural history paintings. The attention to detail can be compared with the work of Zayn al-Din and the 'Impey artists' in Calcutta. Though Zayn al-Din is best known for his paintings of birds, his work for Lady Impey included a number of large mammals, including a Shawl Goat, a Cheetah, and a Great Indian Fruit Bat (William Dalrymple, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting from the East India Company, London, 2019, p.45, p.51, and p.70). Most similar to this painting are depictions of a Musk Deer in a private collection and another of a Sambar Deer (Dalrymple, p.50). The latter, which like ours is on a cropped piece of paper, was attributed to Zayn al-Din by Stuart Cary Welch in 1985. One feature of our painting which that does not share is the shading on the ground. Though almost every Impey folio does not include any shadows, there is some light shading which appears around the feet of the depiction of Lady Impey's pangolin (Dalrymple, op. cit., p.52).

The shading around the feet of the deer is closer in style to some of the paintings of mammals from the Collection of the Marquis of Wellesley, such as a civet in the British Library (NHD 32⁄18) and another depicting a porcupine (Stuart Cary Welch, Room for Wonder: Indian Painting during the British Period, New York, 1978, p.57, no.17b). These paintings, like those of the Impey Album, also set their subject against a plain background. On our painting, the softness of the shadows and the generally gentler modelling can also be compared to the portraits of the Fraser Album, such as a group of tribesmen from near Delhi (Mildred Archer and Toby Falk, India Revealed: the Art and Adventures of William and James Fraser, London, 1989, p.112, no.100). The dense sociability of the early company state - where paintings were exchanged and discussed among relatives or within learned societies - contributed to the gradual intermingling of schools and styles in the early 19th century.