Indian Company School Taj Mahal, Agra

An original early 19th-century watercolour painting, Indian Company School, Taj Mahal, Agra.

A beautifully intricate Indian Company school miniature in ink and watercolour showing the iconic facade of the Taj Mahal at Agra. Whilst the Taj Mahal is an extensive complex of buildings and gardens, here is represented the definitive domed white marble mausoleum.

In the 18th century, its bejewelled tomb was plundered, and by the 19th century the Taj Mahal was suffering from neglect and disrepair—a fact that this exacting drawing belies. Near the end of the 19th century, Lord Curzon, then British viceroy of India, ordered a major restoration of the mausoleum complex as part of a colonial effort to preserve India’s artistic and cultural heritage.

This painting is a fine example of an Indian Company miniature painting, produced for Western patrons in India in the 19th century, many of whom were working for the East India Company. It displays the striking hybrid techniques which led to the categorisation of the ‘Company’ style as a School. As an objective architectural elevation it uniquely combines scientific European rationalism with the attention to detail and intense colouring of the Mughal miniature tradition.

Provenance: Mary Twopenny from her cousin David Twopenny, Little Casterton, 1832. David Twopenny, commoner at Oriel College, Oxford and lifelong Vicar of Stockbury in Kent, was a collector of art (a sale of his collection at Christie’s included an extensive collection of fine engravings after Turner).

In watercolour with pen and ink. On wove paper laid down on backing paper.