Indian Botanical Art: an illustrated history

I do love a good coffee table book, and this unusual volume certainly fits the criteria. It’s beautifully presented and, as per the title, lavishly illustrated. According to the foreword, the 18th century saw an increase in interest in the natural world and European travellers were very keen to catalogue plants in Asia. As a result, Indian artists were commissioned to create accurate drawings of plants, particularly those used for food or medicine. Gradually, these drawings became fashionable as art. The book is stuffed with gorgeous full colour plate reproductions of some of these drawings. If you’re familiar with botanical art, which often shows the plants at different stages of growth and includes leaves and flowers laid out flat like paper dolls, then these will look familiar. Everything has an unfamiliar twist, though – I’m a fairly keen gardener but I couldn’t recognise the vast majority of the plants! Opening the book at random, I could see references to spider flower, Himalayan Rhubarb and lacquer plant – I’m pretty sure there are none in the garden here! As well as information about the plants themselves, there’s a history of how the art was commissioned, the artists themselves and the various styles and methods employed. I think it would appeal on a great many levels. It’s a pretty, colourful thing to flick through as the pictures are beautiful. It would be of interest to gardeners, artists and anyone interested in the history of India. Personally I’d have been delighted to get this as a Christmas present, and I think it’s the kind of book where you’ll learn something new every time you open it. -- Sara Walker * freshdesignblog.com * Until the 20th century, illustrated printed books were extremely expensive, requiring an artist to produce the original drawing, an engraver to make the line drawing on a copper plate and then artists to hand-colour the printed engraving. Indian miniature artists were, and still are, excellent copyists. They were soon producing illustrations of plants, often in multiple copies, for reference, under the supervision of European botanists, and using European illustrations as models. There are surviving collections of Indian paintings in many private collections in India and in Britain, but many of those drawn for the East India Company surgeons are in Britain, in the libraries of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Natural History Museum in London, and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. In India, the main collections are in the former Calcutta Botanic Garden (now the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden, Kolkata), the Lalbagh collection in Bangalore (Bengaluru), and the Thanjavur Sarasvati Mahal Library. These Indian botanical paintings, as well as bird and animal paintings and scenes of Indian life, are traditionally known as Company School (or Kampani kalam). This term is now questioned both for its focus upon the European employees of the EIC who commissioned the paintings, rather than the artists themselves, and for concealing the considerable stylistic diversity of the artworks. Furthermore, similar works produced in other parts of the East Indies, China and Japan are also confusingly termed Company School. The Calcutta Botanic Garden, the pre-eminent botanical institute in India, was founded in 1786 at Sibpur on the right bank of the Hooghly river just below Calcutta, but there were soon other gardens around India, and most of them survive to this day. The Lal Bagh in Bangalore was taken over by the Company from Tipu Sultan in 1799 and the garden at Saharanpur, in Uttar Pradesh near Dehradun was taken over as an experimental garden in 1817. The most famous of those who published illustrated works on the Indian flora during this period was Dr William Roxburgh, whose Plants of the Coast of Coromandel (1795–1819), started while he was based in coastal Andhra, is particularly splendid. Roxburgh later moved to superintend the Calcutta Botanic Garden, where he was followed by Dr Nathaniel Wallich, whose Plantae Asiaticae Rariores, also with 300 superb hand-coloured plates, was published between 1830 and 1832. While based in Saharanpur, John Forbes Royle published his Illustrations of the Botany of the Himalayan Mountains (1833–1840). The great botanical artist Vishnupersaud made illustrations for both Wallich and Royle – arguably the most beautiful of all the illustrations of Indian plants ever made. of the Scottish botanists, Dr Robert Wight (1796–1872) was the most prolific, commissioning and publishing hundreds of detailed scientific drawings of plants, mainly from southern India, including Spicilegium Neilgherrense (1846 and 1851) and Icones Plantarum Indiae Orientalis (1838–1853). The drawings for these works were by Rungiah and his pupil Govindoo. These books were engraved or lithographed from the original paintings by Indian artists, and although printed in small editions and correspondingly rare, they can be found in libraries in India and elsewhere. But in addition to these published illustrations, Roxburgh, Wallich and Wight commissioned large numbers of plant paintings that have remained unpublished and almost unknown. A second high point in Indian botanical art has occurred much more recently, and there is now a lively interest in the subject. In the absence of specialist courses at home most Indian botanical artists, such as Hemlata Pradhan and Nirupa Rao, have travelled abroad for training; but as a new generation of young and talented painters have returned to India, there is now a far greater chance for aspiring botanical artists to obtain instruction locally. A parallel group of artists has been trained in India (particularly in Jaipur, Rajasthan), using traditional techniques of miniature painting as handed down from the artists trained at the courts of Mughal emperors. These skills are well suited to the demands of botanical painting, even if usually put to more purely decorative ends. Thanks to the internet, and international support and exhibitions, the work of this new generation of artists in all its diversity has deservedly become more widely known, and paintings and prints can be sold to collectors anywhere in the world. -- Home and Garden