From the eighteenth century various European artists came to India; along with t

he British traders and rulers. They brought with them the idea of realism. Reali
sm meant that the artist had to depict everything like real life. This was possi
ble with the use of oil painting with which the contemporary Indian artists were
not familiar. The use of oil paint made it possible for the artist to make imag
es which looked real.
Portrait painting was a popular art form in colonial India. The rich and the pow
erful (both British and Indian), wanted their portrait on canvas. While the trad
itional Indian artists made miniature portraits, the European painters made larg
e and lifelike portraits. The person who commissioned these paintings tried to p
roject his importance by the size of the painting. The portraits of British offi
cials project a lavish lifestyle. The Indians are always shown in the shadow; as
submissive people in these portraits. Many Indian nawabs also commissioned huge
oil portraits by European painters. For them, this was the only way to show the
ir power because they already had lost their authority to the colonial power. Mo
reover, this was one of the various ways in which a nawab could imitate the life
style of the British.
Imperial history paintings were an attempt to create a public memory of imperial
triumphs*********. Such paintings were used as tools to showcase the British as
invincible and all powerful.
This was the period when the artists who used to work in the courts of various k
ings saw a change in their life and fortune. Some of them continued to paint in
the traditional style of miniature paintings and mural painting. For example; Ti
pu Sultan always resisted the cultural traditions associated with the British. H
ence, he gave patronage to various court painters. His palace at Seringapatam wa
s covered with murals done by local artists. A different trend can be seen in th
e court of Murshidabad. The British had installed their puppet nawabs in Murshid
abad. Hence, the court at Murshidabad encouraged local artists to absorb the Bri
tish artistic style. The local artists at the court of Murshidabad began to use
perspective and light and shadow in their paintings. Some of the local painters
were not so lucky. They lost their influence and wealth because of lack of patro
ns. They turned to the British.
Many village artists started migrating to the city in the hope of new patrons an
d new buyers of their art. They used to paint from mythological themes and made
images of gods and goddesses. The traditional paintings looked flat; like the tr
aditional paintings from other parts of India. During the nineteenth century, th
e Kalighat painters began to use shading to give more depth to their painting. A
fter the 1840s, the Kalighat artists also began to depict contemporary themes fr
om the society. They also began to mock at the attitude of educated Indians towa
rds blind aping of the western culture.
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Artists and their paintings:
1. Rabindranath Tagore: He was a Bengali polymath who reshaped Bengali literatur
e and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tagore wrote poetry as an
eight-year-old. At age sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under t
he pseudonym Bhaanusimha ("Sun Lion"). Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning
rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. He became the first
non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.
2. Raja Ravi Varma: