prologue
ART14 SMITHSONIAN.COM | December 2019BEFORE AUDUBON
An 18th-century album
of India’s fl ora and fauna
showcases the startling work
of an overlooked masterI
N THE LATE 1770S, a British colonial offi cial
named Sir Elijah Impey and his wife, Lady Mary,
commissioned the Indian artist Shaikh Zain ud-
Din to catalog a private menagerie, including vari-
ous bird species, the couple had assembled at their
home in Calcutta. Using paper and watercolors
from England, Zain ud-Din, a Muslim from the city of Patna,
modeled his work after English botanical illustration, but he
also brought to the job his training in the ornate Mughal ar-
tistic tradition—and his own distinctive style. Today critics
praise the quality of the colors and the composition , in which
a bright, simple background off sets the keenly wrought de-
tails of plants and animals. “Everything is incredibly precise
and beautifully observant,” says Xavier Bray, director of Lon-
don’s Wallace Collection, which this month mounts the fi rst
UK exhibition of works by Indian artists commissioned by
offi cers of the British East India Company.
The expat aristocrats who patronized Zain ud-Din and
his fellow artists had been sent abroad to help manage
their country’s growing empire, but once there many, like
the Impeys, fell in love with the subcontinent, as well as its
fl ora and fauna. “These paintings,” Bray says, “were made
into albums to be leafed through back home, on a rainy
day, drinking Earl Grey tea.”
History failed to record much about Zain ud-Din’s life
beyond his watercolors for the Impeys. But the new show,
which includes 99 paintings of nature studies, portraits and
landscapes by 18 artists, makes an argument that he and his
contemporaries should be recognized on their own merits,
as some of India’s greatest painters. “Anything with a colo-
nial air about it is now considered politically incorrect,” Bray
says. “But what we’re trying to do is bring back these extraor-
dinary artists who have been almost completely forgotten.”