Forgotten Masters

As the East India Company extended its sway across India in the late eighteenth century, many remarkable artworks were commissioned by Company officials from Indian painters who had previously worked for the Mughals. Published to coincide with the first UK exhibition of these masterworks at The Wallace Collection, this book celebrates the work of a series of extraordinary Indian artists, each with their own style and tastes and agency, all of whom worked for British patrons between the 1770s and the bloody end of the Mughal rule in 1857.

Forgotten Masters, edited by writer and historian William Dalrymple, explores these hybrid paintings that encompass both the beauty of the Indian natural world and the social realities of the time. The book features one hundred masterpieces, often of astonishing brilliance and originality, shedding light on a forgotten moment in Anglo-Indian history. During this period, Indian artists responded to European influences while maintaining their own artistic visions and styles.

These artists represent the last phase of Indian artistic genius before the onset of twin assaults: photography and the influence of western colonial art schools, which ended an unbroken tradition of painting that had lasted two thousand years. As shown by these masterworks, the greatest of these painters deserve to be remembered as among the most remarkable Indian artists of all time.