Indian Company School Taj Mahal Garden View, Agra

An original c.1860 watercolour painting – Indian Company School, Taj Mahal Garden View, Agra.

An exceptional miniature Indian Company painting showing the iconic domed white marble mausoleum of the Taj Mahal at Agra. The gardens are foreshortened, reducing the long causeway and raised marble water tank—the Hawd al-Kawthar or 'Tank of Abundance'—to miniature scale. The view is captioned in Persian below, translating to 'Plan of the pool/basin'.

Painted in the mid-19th century, the gardens are shown to be lush and abundant, appearing radically different from how they are today. The Mughal charbagh or 'paradise garden' originally featured dense orchards of fruit trees and thick foliage, with fruit trees symbolically planted to represent life and cypress trees to represent death. Neglect in the 18th century meant that by the 19th century the Taj Mahal was suffering from disrepair and the gardens were becoming increasingly overgrown. In the latter half of the 19th century, Lord Curzon, then British viceroy of India, ordered a major restoration of the mausoleum complex. Not only was this a colonial effort to preserve India’s artistic and cultural heritage, it was a colonialist opportunity to impose a 'civilising' aesthetic, replacing its exuberant abundance with manicured, flat lawns reminiscent of London parks.

This Company School miniature captures this rare view in exquisite detail, with beautifully painted foliage, fine pietra dura to the marble facade and minute touches of gold paint to represent the gilded roof finials.

This painting is a fine example of an Indian Company painting, produced for Western (especially British) 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. While incorporating traditional elements from Rajput and Mughal painting, they were given a more 'western' appearance through their use of perspective and rounded modelling, as opposed to the more decorative, 'flatter' styles that had gone before.

In watercolour with touches of gold paint on laid paper with coronet blindstamp.

Provenance: The painting is accompanied by a printed fragment from 'Collector's Corner' catalogue 1964, describing the work as being one of 'Five exquisitely drawn views of important buildings, executed in bright colours. From the collection of Major E.J. Simpson who brought them from India in 1864.' Collector's Corner catalogues were produced by the Folio Society in the 1960s as specialised sales lists offering historical art, antique prints, and medieval manuscript fragments instead of the publisher's standard modern books.