Empire: World History - 225. Painting the Empire: Art of the East India Company (Ep 1)

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

Company School painting is a fascinating yet often overlooked artistic tradition that emerged during the British East India Company’s rule in India. Indian artists blended Mughal, Rajput, and European styles to create detailed and vibrant artworks focused on flora and fauna. What makes these paintings extraordinary is how they capture not only scientific precision but also the rich artistic traditions of India.  At the heart of this story is the city of Lucknow, a hub of artistic and cultural refinement, where European imperialists like Claude Martin sought to document India’s natural world. Martin, a French adventurer-turned-British officer, was so committed to this project that he imported thousands of sheets of European watercolour paper and assembled a team of Indian artists to create meticulous botanical and zoological illustrations.  But as much as these paintings were a product of imperialism, they also provided an unprecedented opportunity for Indian artists to leave a lasting impression. Unlike earlier court art, which often left artists anonymous, Company School paintings are some of the first works where individual Indian painters were credited by name.  Listen as William and Anita unravel the intricate web of art, science, and empire, revealing a world where botanical illustrations were not just scientific tools, but also symbols of a rapidly changing society. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durhampool. You're doing that thing of leaning right in and bellowing at people. Just chill, man. There we go. God's sake.

You know what? I'm very excited. You're full of Vim and Vigur because you've come off a flight and you've just had such fun telling me who you were sitting next to. So who are you sitting next to you on the flight that just got in? Well, I have to say, I didn't recognize him, and he was sort of under a baseball cap, sort of hiding his face. Was it Farrell?

Was it the musicals prima? It was Ed Shearer. It was Ed Shearren. Ed Shearer. Ed Shearer was off to play a gig in all places in Bhutan. Really? So if you're listening to this episode, not Ed, but anyone else that happens to be in Bhutan,

the improbable gig coming your ways, Ed Shearer. Did you not charm him? Did you not tell him all about the Empire podcast? What's wrong with you? Well, I have to say, it didn't look as if A, he was particularly wanting a very long conversation at 7 in the morning, or 5 in the morning UK time this morning when we got into Delhi. Any more than the day before, my other little celeb spot of having it. Wait a minute.

So are you saying to me, you just saw it? Ed Shearer on a flood. This is very different to the story I anticipated. You said you sat next to him. I imagined like a whole wine dine. Oh, Ed. Your musical stylings are so very good. I thought you'd do that.

You know, just dazzle him with your musical knowledge. I did do a little bit of job. You looked at him. Did you? I didn't get the impression that he was a keen listener of the Empire podcast or indeed a reader of my earths. Oh, really? Ed. If your friends are there cheering, tell him he missed out on a treat.

He could have had a chat with one of the most entertaining men in the world. I did my best to dazzle him with my charm, but I had to say that he did disappear into his iPods and his baseball cap. He could have been regaled with your tales of a knowledge of popular culture. But the air hostesses were very excited. There was lots of autograph hunting by the entire cabin crew. I cut you off in your oeuvre. Who was the other guy you saw yesterday? Well, day before, I was probably at Davos giving a talk there, and I was being interviewed on a fire escape, actually.

Just because it was outside. Clammer. And it was a nice bright spot to do an interview that was very quiet, until this sort of entourage came thundering through the middle of the interview, in the head of which was that other than David Beckham. And I can exclusively reveal he has a lot more tats on his neck than you ever see on television. imagine. Very heavily to do. You heard it here first, listeners. All breaking news.

This is very, very good. We don't normally do celeb gossip on Empire. Yes, we do. Who are you kidding? If we ever see them, we talk about them. We're that desperate and also dazzled. Look, right, concentration, bags of hush now, because we are here to talk about a brilliant and rather surprising moment in art history.

when the East India companies wished to record animals and plants of this new land that they were conquering with gay abandon, led to the recruitment of some of the best artists in India at the time to illustrate flora, fauna, animals they'd only dreamt of or heard of. And the result is this wonderful hybrid art that is called Company School painting. And you are a massive fan. I mean, you are, you know, even more than Ed Sheeran's work, you're a fan of the company painting. Rather more of a fan of Compu's painting. I do bang on about company painting, or indeed David Beckham. I would swap the complete works of Beckham and Sherron for a couple of very nice company school paintings. Okay.

So what is it? And why are you so fascinated by it? So, first of all, I think the term company school painting does it a disservice because it makes it sound like it's sort of, you know, produced by the East India Company. And what actually is happening is something much more interesting. In the process of trying to find commercially viable plants to say, And of course, in the story of this, the most commercially viable thing, the East Indy Company latches onto is opium and the opium poppies and also rubber. There's a whole variety of fortunes to be made for the company by taking an interest. So the East Indy Company, obviously, at its heart,

is a commercial company. And it didn't primarily exist to conquer land. It primarily existed to find things to trade. And part of those things that it traded was plants and animals, as we talked with Satnam Sangerra in our last couple of episodes. And in order to find things to sell from the plant and botanical world, the East India Company recruits a whole lot of very uncommercially minded botanists who leap on the chance to be sent out to India, which is the exclusive preserve of the East India. You can't just go off and collect plants in 18th century India. You have to have an East India Company passport and they're very jealously guarded. And so you find this group of enthusiasts for botanism.

coming out of Oxford and particularly out of Edinburgh University, where there's a huge botanical movement going on. And these guys find themselves in India. And then they have to have their plants illustrated. Today, you know, you just take out your cell phone and photograph the plants or possibly, you know, do a proper studio shoot with amazing cameras and lighting. But the equivalent of that in the 18th century was to find existing, brilliant mogul artists. And we've talked, in the Mogul series, all about how among the many wonders of mogul art were the botanical pictures done by Mansour at the court of Jhungia. There was a tradition in India of painting animals. One of the other things I did between meeting Messrs. Beckham and Sherin and getting back to

my farm was going to the mogul show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. and seeing, for the first time, actually, many of those Mansour pictures, since we actually did the episode, I've only ever seen them as illustrations. And they had almost a whole room of the turkey, the zebra, a wonderful blue bull I'd never seen before a nil guy. So what the company does is that these botanists recruit people from that tradition, but also painters who are used to painting other things, too. Like, you know, there's whole groups of painters on the Andro Coast who paint textiles and do, lovely patterns and these famously beautiful Indian textiles of scrolls of plants and so on. I was going to ask you because, you know, people won't know, you know this backwards,

forwards and you do light up in a way that is phenomenal, like a firework when you talk about company paintings. But there are different styles. We've talked about the Mughal style, but there is also a Punjabi style, a Bahá'i style, which is Bahá'i meaning from the mountains, a Tamil style. I mean, every part of India has a different sensibility towards art now as well. And so the company doesn't just draw from those Mansour school painters. They go and they seek out all the styles, don't they? Exactly right. And that's why I have always been rather unsure about the phrase company school painting.

And when I did an exhibition of these paintings at the Wallace Collection called Forgotten Masters four years ago, just in the middle of lockdown, we produced this show. We never used the phrase company school painting. It was Indian painting for the East India Company. Which is so much better because company school suggests one style, one apprentice. and it isn't. It's a collection. What I also love about this, what you've told me about company school painting, is that it is actually quite a democratising process in art because they do go to the court painters. So you've got the very grand imperial painters like Gullah Ali Khan,

for example. But you also get to, you know, the very humble Muchis, who were leather workers, who were deemed to be at that time untouchable, who today are called Dalits. So, I mean, that would have been unthinkable in a court to have people from that caste and class painting in any meaningful way, but the company sought them out if they were good. And the company is very utilitarian. If these guys are capable of producing good likenesses of the plants or botany or the animal specimens which they're meant to be painting, then they're employed. And so you get a vast variety of different sorts of painting happening in different botanic gardens. So the ones around Delhi are obviously very much more in a Mughal style, straightly

representational. The sort of thing you're getting on the coast of Andhra Pradesh, where the local tradition of painting is painting scrolls and textiles, is far more sort of imaginative. And, you know, the plants are made to almost do a dance across the page with their sort of scrolls going off in improbable direction. It's a completely different approach to that in Delhi. I mean, the other democratisation is that, you know, the company is not an entity that commissions these things. It's people working for the East India Company, so you can get people from all tears saying, do you know, I quite fancy a picture of a tiger, or I quite like that plant growing at the foothills of that particular mountain. And so you have people from very different walks of life.

I mean, soldiers, civil servants, diplomats, missionaries, judges, women. I mean, you know, they get a say as well, women, even the women get in on the act. But they all commission. And so that's why company painting is as vibrant and diverse as it is. What's interesting is that a lot of these enthusiastic botanists are sensitive enough to, for example, take an interest in the painters who are painting for them. They develop relationships. And so far more than in the art that precedes it, you're often aware of the identity of the painter. And they have a biography, they have a name. And so one of the things we tried to do in this exhibition was to group this material under the names of the different artists who produced it.

And that shouldn't be a revolutionary thing. There's not one, but two exhibitions that you've put together, one in New York and one in London, where you've curated and collected these things. I mean, you're saying that's what we tried to. You're not mentioned what you did, mate. So these were like two major exhibitions of company work. One of the nicest jobs I've ever had was pulling all this stuff together. of all, was the one in New York, which was specifically about the art of Delhi, called princes and painters. And then there was the one in the Wallace Collection more recently,

which was from all over India. And that was called Forgotten Masters, Indian painting for the East India Company. And particularly the Wallace Collection show was beautifully designed by the museum with gorgeous colours. And we had rooms for the different painters. And today we kind of assume that, when we open a history of art book, that painting in the West is grouped by artists. So you have the pre-raphites with Byrhen-Jones and Rosetti, and you have the great Renaissance artists, whether it's Michelangelo or Leonardo or Raphael or whoever. And that is not the case often with the art of India. Often they just say, Pahari.

There's just a school called Pahari painting where there's a lot of work done from an area. But the artists are not given identities or agencies. And this isn't just being sort of woke and right on. It's obviously vital, if you're trying to understand what's going on, to understand the artists who are producing this in the backgrounds they come from and what's driving them. And so we worked out these extraordinary relationships between painters who are often trained to paint grand court scenes, images of Nawab's holding court with nobleman grouped around them, or maybe watching dancing girls or doing courtly things.

And here they are later in their lives. being hired by the East Indy Company to paint usually botanical scenes, sometimes birds, beasts, reptiles, snakes, but also sort of local oddities. So there's a wonderful set of paintings called the sheep eater of Fatigar, who was a sadu, who was famous for sort of disemboweling sheeps and eating the whole thing from top to bottom. And the company officers were clearly fascinated by this sort of guy who performed this, apparently almost as a sort of circus trick. and people commissioned lots of pictures of him disemboweling the sheep. And among the pictures, which we get at this time, are these very democratic images of Indian village scenes.

Sometimes done for colonial reasons, you know, in other words, these are taxpayers whose identities the company wants to know. So you get the painterly equivalent of mugshots of villagers. But this is the first pictures in Indian art, certainly since maybe a junta in about sort of 100 BC, where you're getting ordinary villages. being painted with all their sort of warts and all, one of them's lost a nine, others had smallpox. It's marvellous, yeah. I mean, it's sort of the difference between those manored photos from Victorian times of people sort of staring in the camera with deadness in their eyes. And then you've got those sort of Victorian street scenes where, you know, the early documenters of life

are sort of taking these huge daguerre types of streets rather than a person. And they tell you so much more. Now, look, I want to go back, really, to the start of all of this, because it is the late 1700s that you have artists who are flooding into the city of Lucknow. Now Lucknow, at this time, in the late 1700s, was at the height of the Golden Age. It was known as a, what is it, the Monte Carlo, the Venice, I mean, it's the Rome of India. I've had all sorts of different descriptions for it. Or possibly a bit of 1970s, Tehran and Monte Carlo crossed with a bit of Las Vegas and maybe a bit of blindborn. So it was an artist magnet. And part of the reason, I think it's really important to understand why artists were sort of flooding into Lucknow. It's because the other

major Mughal city, Delhi, had been looted and burned a few times. You know, it was a poor benighted place. And so people really weren't, you know, didn't have enough time to get the palates out, let alone start painting. So they all head to Lucknow, which is this nurturer of talent, a place that appreciates art and beauty, its reputation. Even now, actually, is linked with finesse. Lucknowi Punjabi, so Punjabi is a language I speak, is this. the sweetest form of Punjabi. It's very mannered. You go to Punjabi, it sounds like you're having a fight. I can say this. I'm Punjabi. But you know, you go to other parts of Punjab and it's a very different sort of brusker language. But the Lucknow, Punjabi and the Lucknow culture was high

art, high living, high manners. And this is the place really, it's the sort of the nursery for much of what will become company art. Absolutely right. And there's this famous culture of the ta' wives, who we would call the courtesans, who in the culture of the time were much, much more. They were the school of manners, and people sent their teenage sons off to the cuties of the ta'wifes. And there they would learn the art of courtly living, how to make conversation to women, how to pass upon, how to recite poetry, when to recite poetry. and the no-wabs were on one hand regarded, I think, as terrifically decadent, particularly by the British, but on the other were regarded as people that spent their vast fortunes on art, on dance, on music. And they also attracted, as always is the case, if you have patrons who are open-fisted and are throwing money around at artists.

They produce a town around them, which is like, you know, florid. in the early 1400s or equivalents, you know, the Netherlands at the time of Rembrandt or whenever it is. And there is an extraordinary amount of music, of painting, and of high civilization coming out of this. And it's a place where Europeans and Indians mix on an equal footing in a way that's just not happening in the most of the rest of India. And when they do mix, they are impressed rather than sort of looking down on the natives, as you say, there's a reason to sort of look up. The British correspondent, the very famous journalist, William Russell, writes of his time in Lucknow, is not Rome, not Athens, not any city I have ever seen appears to me so striking and beautiful as this.

So, you know, it isn't that sort of, you know, the kind of orientalism that makes us all go, which is, you know, oh, look, isn't it exotic but slightly lower than us? It is an admiration that's going on. Yes, and people are passing, in the sense, culturally in both directions. On one hand, the Nawab sometimes amazed British visitors and turning up dressed in the uniform of a British admiral or even a clergyman of the church. Yes.

But at the same time, you have all these pictures of all these fabulous nabobs, throwing away their East Indy company breeches and dressing in long avardi gowns, lying back on carpets, hookers in their mouths as they're watching nauticals. And there's all sorts of reasons you can be down on this, but it's rather a marvellous place. You've used two terms that we ought to explain. So the niravs are kind of the nobility,

the people with the money, the people with the bling, the people with the cash, who are native Indians. The nawabs are the governors. They're the mogul governors. They're the rulers. But the nabob is a term that's given to white men

who have come over to India, who have, to use the term, gone native, you know, who've sort of started fratonising, falling in love with, having children with, and living a little bit too Indian, as the East India Company

will eventually start feeling. But at the beginning, it happens. Now, tell us about some of the really interesting people in this company painting story. I mean, there's a whole world of strange Europeans who've come to Lucknow to make their fortunes. And these are not just sort of, you know, men. There are two British men's subs who end up marrying Nawabs. Bizarrely, there's one of the most beautiful mosques in Lucknow turns out to have been built for a British woman who converted to Islam and married the Noirp.

And it's sitting there on the edge of the British residence, It's a woman called Miss Walters who got sort of sucked into this world. And there is a wonderful character at the heart of the British end of this city. This is around the residency building and a wonderful character, one of my favorite East India Company offices called Major William Palmer. And a portrait survives probably by Zophony, although art historians occasionally sort of have long debates about this. And it's one of the most famous pictures of the time because it is the very antithesis of the kind of Kersen, racist, Raji world that we're so familiar with. In this picture, Palmer is sitting on a chair and he is gazing with love and adoration at his incredibly beautiful wife, who's a wonderful woman called Fais Begham, who's a kind of mogul princess, who is a, sitting below him. She's sitting on the floor. He's sitting on a chair. But she has on her lap,

her newborn baby boy with a little Muslim cap on his head. Two other children are looking in at the baby in their Lucknowvy gowns. Fais's sister is sitting the far side of her brother-in-law. There are Ayers. And it's just a very charming image of a happy mixed-race family from the mid-18th century, which you just, you don't imagine. You don't expect and you don't, but the other thing that's really striking about it is that the structure of the painting or rather the arrangement of the painting is very much reminds me of those ones with the adoration of the baby Jesus. The child, this mixed-raised child is the most important thing in the painting.

So again, the stigma of having a mixed-raced relationship or what they would become known as mongrel children, that stigma is nowhere to be seen in this picture because the radiance is coming from the mother and the mixed-race child. except, you know, it looks like the adoration of the baby. You've got sort of palm trees and exotic plants in the background, you know, and the man in the chair is wearing a very smart Western European suit. So yes, that's fantastic. Zophony, you mentioned Zophani that you think it's Zophani.

Tell me, am I right? Is there a really dark story? Or am I imagining it over Zofony? There is a dark story, and it is true. Zofany has the distinguishing mark of being the only royal account. had a mission that we know definitely to have been a cannibal. That we know for sure. Wait a minute.

We have suspicions about a number of others. Yes, I mean, they look like they could. But what did he do? Why did Zofany eat somebody? Who did he eat? I mean, there's so many questions. I remember a rumor, but just put some flesh on the bones of this story, would you? Pleasure.

So Zofany is part of this extraordinary circle of Brits and Europeans, of which there are a great variety, who are attracted by the Nawab's wealth and come to try and make their fortunes. And Zofany, when he goes out to India, is still a struggling painter. By the time he comes back, is an established master who knows that when he hits England, he'll be able to command great prices and already have a network of admirers because of the extraordinary work he's produced in Lucknow. But what he doesn't expect is that he is shipwrecked on the way home. And it's like one of those stories of, you know, planes going down in the Andes, and they end up

having to eat the dead passengers and that sort of stuff. This is the same thing. In order to survive, they end up eating a second lieutenant who's... Oh my God. It's just awful. I shouldn't laugh. It's awful. And he's buried not very far from where we both live in West London.

He's on Q Green, very appropriate for this story. You're kidding. Near Q Gardens, just outside Q Gardens. Oh, my goodness. Well, I'm going to go and have a look at that. Right. So that's the cannibal painter. Okay.

Tell me about another. as it happens, Major Palmer's friends, because I love the sound of Colonel Antoine Bolié. Tell me about Antoine, Pollyé. Bolié is another wonderful character. He's painted by Zofni. There's one wonderful Zofni, which I actually saw in Calcutta a fortnight ago, is now up in the Victoria Memorial Museum. And at the centre of the picture is Zofani, painting away. And he's flanked by two friends, and we're going to talk about both of them.

Paulyé is the first. He's sitting there with a sort of beaver-skin hat on. like he's come out of sort of David Crockett. He does. He does. That's on his head. And yet on his sort of shoulders is, you know, a very stiff East India Company jacket. And he's all dressed up with the, you know, the full cravat and everything else you'd expect. And a particularly memorable pair of moustaches, what was called Moulbrus in 18th century.

Anyway, Pollyé is part of this world. And he is one of the very first Europeans to commission serially work from Lucknow artists. and he is fascinated by the art of the Mughals. And we have a whole range of his correspondence, which is now in Paris in the Bibliote Nacional, where he corresponds with Mughal painters. Actually, these are almost the only letters in existence from patrons to Mughal artists.

He can be quite peremptory at times. You know, go to Delhi, paint me the court, come back immediately. And there's no question that he's the boss. But that other times he is clearly in love with this whole world of Mughal painting and a great specialist and connoisseur in it. And his collection is now split up between London and Paris and Vienna. And he makes the decision like Zofni to go back to Europe.

But in his case, he chooses exactly the wrong time to go and buy a chateau in France with his earnings from the noirbes because he buys a chateau in France in 1787, which, as your historical imagination. Hang on a bit, just worked it out. So the man who lost his head over Indian painting and culture ends up losing his head? He goes to guillotine. A guillotine. He, like his friend, Major Palmer, fell in love with not one, but two Indian wives.

I mean, he had two. Isn't that right? A junior and a senior? And they're constantly squabbling. And their correspondence, I once went to the Archive de Savois in France and got out the correspondence of many of this circle, which are kept there. in the archives of a guy called General Du Boin. And General Du Boin is left with these two scoffly wives when Pollyne goes back. And there are reams of correspondence about the two women

sort of continuing their cat fight over the next 10 years. But the key character who is at the center of this whole network, the reason that Pollyne and Zoffini are there and that they know each other is the most important character of all, and this is a man called Claude Martin. famous today because he set up two schools, which still exist, the La Martinier schools. A very posh school, in fact. It's sort of an eaten harrow type thing. Exactly in the Indian context. The Lucknow school still survives as a school to this day.

And it's in the building. He built as a sort of at once a mausoleum, a fortress and a center of operations. And it was originally called Constantier. It's now known as La Matiniaz. And on the facade are two fantastic East India Company lions, which are about three or four times life size. And they have behind the eyes of the lions spaces so that you could put flaming torches into the eye sockets and light them up. So these wonderful lions would be sort of a flame with flames coming out of their mouths and eyes. And Claude Mata was born in Lille in 1735. at 16, he signs up for the company Desaunt, the French East India Company. He makes a first fortune as a sort of buccaneer businessman and an indigo planter. He then realizes that the

company de Zand is going down and he crosses the lines and signs up with the British for purely pragmatic reasons. And in Lucknow, he makes a fortune providing all the luxuries to the noirbs that they want, all the later stuff from Europe. But at the same time, he's same time, with the fortune that he makes, allows him to operate as he imagines himself as a sort of David Hume or a Linnaeus character washed up on the shores of the Gompti River. And he gets all the latest scientific and philosophical journals out of Paris. For example, two years after the Mongolia brothers have built a hot air balloon and traveled over Paris in it. Claude Martin, using the descriptions in French scientific journals, does the same in

luck now and builds his own hot air balloon and even more remarkable, and this is kind of, I think, alone would be enough to immortalise him. His appendix goes and he knows that he's going to die unless it's operating on, but he doesn't trust any of the Luab's doctors. So using a scientific journal out of Paris, he removes his own appendix. Oh my God, he's enough to. successfully and soes himself up again. He's a complete luck case. You know, do it yourself with equivalent of a YouTube video. Can you imagine?

I sort of get queasy when I hear stories about people who remove their own teeth by tying like some string to their tooth and the door. Completely of a different quantum. Look, I'm also really interested. I mean, apart from when he's not chopping himself up, He's so serious about his painting and his art that he imports no less than 17,000 sheets of European watercolour paper and gets, you know, a Lucknowy master to get this sort of team together to paint a series of natural histories, which are now some of the finest collections of these things known to man.

Absolutely right. I think we're going to have to have a break there, but we're going to come back after the break to talk about Claude Martin and the birth of this new style of painting. Welcome back. So just before the break, William had introduced us to this. rather extraordinary in that case, Claude Martyr, who is a huge patron of the art, also self-surgeon, who removed his own appendix, which I'm still reeling from. But this idea of wanting to create and sponsor

and be a patron to so many artists, he's so serious about it, it becomes actually a school, doesn't it? He's in Lucknow. He loves Lucknow. It becomes a Lucknowy School of Painting. Well, he is operating in a town that is absolutely packed to the gunwales with, it's rather like arriving in LA today and finding it already

full of actors, artists, writers, screenwriters, all these sort of people who have assembled around Hollywood. The same is true of Claude Martin's luck now. So much have the noirbs poured their money into the arts that there is a huge pool of talent. And as you mentioned at the beginning, it's also been partly serviced by the fact that Delhi at this period is almost unlivable then, the Afghan and Maratha armies going backwards and forwards over the ruins of Delhi. And many of the Delhi artists and painters and singers and dancers have fled to Lucknow and to Bengal, where it's more peaceful. And so Claude Martin has this dream of bringing together these two worlds. On one hand, the world of the 18th century enlightenment that he loves and misses

in Europe and which he's keeping tabs on by periodicals. coming and whole libraries being sent out from France. And one of the key imports that arrives in a great series of boxes at Constantia for Claude Martin at this period is a massive multi-volume book called Les Voiso de France, which over many volumes has a complete set of descriptions of every bird that you can find in 18th century France with a painting opposite. And the painting, is in that sort of European botanical style whereby the bird is on a white background. It's cut off from, in a sense, the world that it's connected with other than sitting on a stump or on a branch of a tree. And it's painted in fantastic scientific detail. And this is all connected

with the attempts of Linnaeus, the French zoologist and botanist, to classify the world, to enumerate an index and archive the world around him. And Claude Martin thinks, you know, great, I can do this here. There's absolutely nothing that they've done in Paris that I can't do as well or better using the local artists of Lucknow. And as he's already connected with the court and with the noirbs, he just starts employing the Lucknow artists to try and do the same as the Les Voiselle de France have done in France to do it in Lucknow. And there are a whole series of very comical early versions where the local style to paint paintings had been to produce a figure of maybe a local mullah or a nobleman or a leading merchant

standing in a perfectly drawn portrait on a landscape where there are these tiny little trees and ruins in the background. And beautiful, romantic. Yes, exactly. Like, they're huge sort of monsters rising up from the middle of it. It looks odd enough when it's a human being, a mullah or a noab painted in the style. But it looks absolutely extraordinary. Absurd.

When a bird, like a stalk, and there's a prickly famous adjutant stalk painted in that night at this period, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, where this sort of Godzilla bird rises above the landscape. as if it's sort of 500 feet tall rather than... Run for your lives. The gigantic stalk is coming for us. So he decides white backgrounds is the way to go, is he?

So after experimenting in the local style and allowing the artists in a sense to paint how they would normally paint any portrait because these are sort of animal portraits as much as natural history studies, you very much feel that the artist is trying to capture the spirit and the character of the animals as much as their physical appearance.

And so after that, he decides to go more European, and he tells the artists not to do these landscapes, but to follow Les Réz du France and just have white backgrounds. And a whole set of these paintings called the Lucknow Menagerie appeared on the London art market. They wouldn't have ever seen them before about 20 years ago. And they're some of the very greatest late 18th century Indian paintings they've ever painted.

I mean, just give us an idea of scale. How big are these? They're not necessarily very big because a lot of these artists painted, you know, miniatures, as the name suggests. Often they're an A4 or an A3 sheet of paper at the max. But it's the level of detail that they manage to get. I mean, it is exquisite.

And I've got one particular favourite one that I just love, which is a red-headed merlin, in other words, a sort of castral. And if you sit next to this painting, and use a magnifying glass, you can see every single filament of every feather on that bird. And the artist has used one of these squirrel hair brushes to capture every single stroke of every single feather that this bird has. And you can see them enjoying it, rather like their counterparts enjoy doing the patterns on a complicated Kashmiri shawl, or those sort of paisley patterns.

hypnotically swirling and these minutely observed gradations of shade. I just want to remind people about the squirrel hair brush, because if you missed our previous episode, this is such a good story. It's worth repeating. But the squirrel hair brush, you have to, as the artist, go and capture a squirrel, humanely, and take a hair. One. One hair. Just the perfect hair. And then use that. And then release said squirrel. So no squirrels are heard in the process of creating, which I love. Look, I mean, you're having so much fun that I didn't want to remind you. But I will always. remind you now, this is part of a series about gardens and you've talked about birds,

are plants figuring prominently in the Martin collection? So not in the first round. Claude Martin produces a first round of pictures which are almost entirely birds. And I think this was directly inspired by the arrival of this set of French bird paintings. He said, I just want to do that for luck now. But about five years later, he decides to do drawings of botany. And this is where, in a sense, our story begins because I'm just towards the end of this episode. Did you see my shoulders just sink into the ground? Oh, for God's sake. It's the very Empire pod.

We're just getting to our... This is where our story begins. It's quite the preamble for you. Go on. And this actually was one of the great discoveries of our show. And I was very lucky to work with one of my favourite artist. who is a wonderful man called Henry Nolte, who for I think his entire career of 40 years, sat cataloging the extraordinary paintings in the Scottish Botanic Garden Collection in Edinburgh.

And no one, I think, had ever really studied this stuff properly until Henry came along. And he is a botanist. He can tell every tiny variation between different subspecies of different sorts of plant. And I was very lucky because when this exhibition happened, Henry had just retired from Edinburgh and had time on his hand for the first time in many years. And I suggested that he go and see what there was in Q, the archives that Sartanam Sangero was talking about on our previous episode. And it turned out that the archives in Q were very badly cataloged and that there's no overall sort of card indexing of their collection. and instead things are just amassed under the different genres of plant.

So ferns are in one big pile and orchids in another. And into these bundles are often tens of thousands of pictures made in different times of these different flowers. And it doesn't matter whether they're produced by artists in China, British artists working in Africa or in North America. they're just grouped under the genus. And Henry used his retirement to go in. And in the end, I think he was there for about six months, he found in the Q collection, I think I'm right saying 658 drawings of birds by Claude Martin,

which were associated with 600s of plants and 606 of reptiles. There we go. We got to the plants and the end. It was good. 600 plants. And these were shown for the first time. in our show. What a find. It was very exciting. It was a very exciting moment. Well, look, and we got there in the end. We've got to a plant. But I promise you, there'll be more plants in the next.

And we've got a sort of a baton handover because you heard William talk earlier about, you know, two major schools of this company painting, one in Lucknow, the other in Calcutta. And the reason we can do a bat on hand is that a man named Impe is a guest of Martin. And this is how a whole brilliant story with more plants begins in our next episode. And just remember, if you want to hear this entire mini series on gardens and imperialism, all you have to do is join our club. That's empirepoduk.com. That's empirepoduk.com.

And you will get a newsletter. You'll get discounts on some of the books that we talk about. You'll get first dibs on tickets. And we are going on tour. But most of all, you'll be part of it. of our wonderful family and get to chat to each other on Discord and get special bonus episodes. So all of that if you join and also you get to binge and who doesn't like a binge. So till we meet again, it's goodbye from me Anita Arnan.

And goodbye from me, William Drupal.