Fathoming key facets of a fascinating Indian miniature collection

An important collection of Indian miniatures belonging to the celebrated American film director James Ivory is on show from 4th November to 17th December at the Francesca Galloway gallery, 31 Dover Street in London. Here are some key facets of this miniature collection:

• The underlying theme of Ivory’s collection is his fascination with India and his acute observation of Indian life, both secular and religious. The majority of the paintings are Rajput but some record the interaction of the British Raj with native India.
  
  
• The James Ivory collection contains an interesting group of portraits from the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. From the middle of the eighteenth century most styles of Indian painting outside of Rajasthan were increasingly affected by renewed European influence.
  
  
• Just as Akbar’s artists copied from and based new paintings on European Renaissance prints, the late Mughal artists of Bengal and Avadh were influenced by European portrait and topographical prints, and often copied them. They were also influenced by the presence of British artists. To Calcutta, and to a lesser extent Madras and Bombay, came a series of British professional artists seeking to make their fortunes.
  
  
• Indian artists worked in a wide variety of styles and techniques during this period, all showing the influence of European art to different degrees. The use of shading and perspective, the abandoning of the traditional profile format and, from the mid-nineteenth century, the influence of photography all contributed to this mixture of Indian and western approaches to the rendition of the human figure and of topography.
  
  
• ‘Company Painting’ is a useful term when the patronage came from employees of the East India Company, but in fact Indian patrons also commissioned such work particularly at such cultural centres as Murshidabad, Lucknow, Delhi, Lahore and Tanjore.
  
  
• Another strand in Delhi painting in the nineteenth century is almost fully europeanized and was reserved normally for British or highly anglicized Indian patrons.

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