Painting a New PICTURE

Colonialism is complicated. History shows that occupiers and subjects often engaged in a mutual, and uneasy, resentment and admiration. Rarely did these relationships end well for either side.

When the British East India Company settled in India, eventually becoming a private occupying force by 1757, its officials reaped not only profits from India’s natural resources, but also from (through April 19), has been mounted at London’s Wallace Collection. As curator William Dalrymple writes in the accompanying catalogue, “Today it is almost impossible to find any major gallery within Britain that still puts on display a significant collection of art connected in any way with the former British Empire.” But as he emphasizes, once the artworks, mostly watercolors, come “to be understood to be the result of a fruitfully catalytic act of patronage of great Indian artists by admiring British patrons, it becomes possible to appreciate these unusually beautiful paintings as an art—indeed one of the most interesting and fecund phases of Indian painting.”