Picture Details
A grain shop
Partner:
British LibraryImage reference:
BL.Add.Or.601Origin:
South, IndiaArtist / Date:
Unknown, c.1850Description:
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The term `Company painting' denotes a type of painting in a semi-European style made by Indian artists in the 18th and 19th centuries for Europeans working for the British, French, Dutch and Danish East India Companies trading in India. Europeans collected these as a kind of social document of the lives they led and which surrounded them in India. They were also a souvenir to show the curious back at home. Artists in Trichinopoly in South India produced sets of mica paintings of trades and occupations using brilliant shades of green and yellow ochre, the opaque colours executed on thin, transparent sheets of mica. Most mica paintings were small and the sets were sold in boxes. Individual paintings could also be mounted in albums in the same way as paintings on paper. They were sold to the numerous British army officers stationed in the South from the 18th century. This painting depicts a grain shop with a thatched roof in a bazaar.
