COMPANY SCHOOL ARTISTS

For Company School artists, painting botanicals were for both its beauty and utility. The illustrations of herbals were used as a means to identify medicinal plants and to document the rich flora and fauna of the subcontinent.

In India, botanical illustrations have largely been associated with the Company School of Art, which came into existence around the late 18th century, though the tradition goes back to the Harappan civilisation.

The Company School is a hybrid Indo-European style of painting made in India by artists mostly employed by the East India Company. In this, traditional elements from Rajput and Mughal paintings were blended with western treatment of perspective and scale.

JAMES FORBES:

Having spent almost twenty years in India working for the East India Company, James Forbes kept a journal where he recorded the fauna, flora, landscape, buildings, and people of Bombay. Some of these served as the basis for his book Oriental Memoirs. These were considered as travel works and were often in demand as the colonisation of India and the expansion of the British Empire fuelled a curiosity about the subcontinent’s culture and landscape

JOHN NUGENT FITCH

John Nugent Fitch, a British botanical illustrator and lithographer was best known for his contribution of 528 plates to The Orchid Album, a landmark work of 11 volumes comprising coloured figures and descriptions of new, rare and beautiful orchidaceous plants. His uncle, Walter Hood Fitch, trained him in a style similar to his own. Nugent Fitch created about 2,500 drawings for botanist William Curtis’s Botanical Magazine from 1878 onwards.

WILLIAM ROXBURGH

Scottish surgeon turned naturalist, William Roxburgh, known as the ‘father of Indian botany’, had hired numerous Indian artists such as Vishnuprasad and Gorachand to paint flowers and plants for him. He created one of the most exhaustive listings of India’s flora. The drawings created for him and his successor, Nathaniel Wallich, were published in London in 1820 after his death under the title Flora Indica.

Under Roxburgh, a botanical garden created on the banks of river Hooghly by his predecessor, Colonel Robert Kyd, flourished. He developed an extensive collection of dried plants or the herbarium and this eventually became the Central National Herbarium under the Botanical Survey of India. Still functional, the herbarium has a repository of more than 2 million plant specimens and 12,300 exclusive Wallich specimens. It also houses the original set of Roxburgh's Flora Indica drawings.

Joseph Paxton

Joseph Paxton was an English landscape gardener and the architect of the Crystal Palace, an iron and glass structure erected in London's Hyde Park to hold the Great Exhibit of 1851. In addition to being a botanist and a self-taught gardener, he was also a botanical artist of note. He built the Great Conservatory in Chatsworth, which was demolished after its decay during World War I.

Anonymous Artists

The East India Company supervisors hired numerous artists to paint flowers and plants and their names may never be known. The exhibit also showcases the works by some of these anonymous makers. One such creator whose name we are unable to confirm made a series titled ‘The Garden’ that will be on display at The Biv. Based on our research we think the artist’s name maybe C Lewis.