Company painting and Raja Ravi Varma

From the eighteenth century, English officers of the East India Company asked local Indian artists, some from Murshidabad, Lucknow or Delhi, to paint Indian people, customs, plants, animals and places, mostly on paper.

The artists mixed their own tradition with the European habit of close observation. This mix is called the Company School. Albums of such paintings were popular even in Britain.

In the mid-nineteenth century, photography replaced Company painting as a way of recording India. British art schools in India taught academic oil painting of Indian subjects.

Raja Ravi Varma of Travancore, largely self-taught, mastered this academic realism. He painted scenes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata on a large scale, dramatic and noble, for example Rama Vanquishing the Pride of the Ocean. Cheap oleograph copies of his paintings reached ordinary homes as calendar pictures.

But by the late nineteenth century, nationalists felt his style was foreign: too western for Indian myths.