Four tribesmen

Local artists typically in the employ of European residents in India and working in a Western realist mode were dubbed Company Painters after the trading companies for whom their patrons worked. The tribesmen seen here are painted using a stippling technique, and the rendering of their physiques is based on European modes of modeling. The number visible above the head of each figure is repeated in a corresponding key in William Fraser’s hand on a protective sheet attached to the back. Although this and other works commissioned by the Fraser brothers appear somewhat ethnographic in intent, the skill of the Indian artist raised them above mere documentation; the participants engage the viewer directly and are portrayed with great empathy.

About the Artist

Masters of the Company Portraits: Ghulam ‘Ali Khan and Others
Active in Delhi 1810–40

It is astonishing how little is known about artists from the circle of Ghulam ’Ali Khan in Delhi, as their works were produced no more than two hundred years ago. European officials, among them Antoine Polier (born in Lausanne, 1741), worked in various parts of India for the English East India Company and provided artists with commissions for new subjects not traditionally of interest to Indian patrons. These pictures — many of them depictions of architecture, flora and fauna, or different occupations and population groups — are executed with a pronounced realism and an interest in social documentation with a distinctly ethnographic edge. In deference to the fact that the majority of the patrons were employees of one of the European trading companies, of which the English East India Company was the most dominant, the style has been termed Company School.

The largest and most impressive group of such paintings was commissioned by the Scottish brothers William and James Fraser. William was first stationed in India in 1802, and together with James, he commissioned an extensive series of pictures of the native peoples. Representatives of various population groups — Afghans, Gurkhas, Sikhs — and foreign ambassadors were portrayed, and they are seen gazing out at the viewer either singly or in groups of various sizes.

The styles oscillate between the Mughal portrait genre and European-inspired ethnographic studies. They focus on the subjects themselves in a documentary manner, eschewing the usual predilection for ornamentation and embellishment. The subjects typically are depicted standing on a slight elevation, either in front of a white background or occasionally, before a backdrop of their native village. European pictorial devices, such as the introduction of cast shadows, are combined with Indian rendering techniques as seen in the stippling of body areas. Often detailed inscriptions attest that the Fraser brothers indeed were interested in documenting the great variety of Indian peoples and their costumes.

Given the systematic recording of the identity of the subjects depicted, it is all the more surprising that they failed to include the names of the artists in their correspondence. Rather, they are simply referred to only generically as the “painters”; only one, Lallji, is identified by name. Accordingly, little is known about the individual members of the families of artists who worked around Ghulam ’Ali Khan. Yet these portraits are unquestionably among the most impressive examples of the genre. They present sympathetic images of the Indian populace of the nineteenth century, and to some extent, they anticipate the early photographic portraits of a half-century later that were to mark the demise of this genre of painting.