225\. Painting the Empire: Art of the East India Company (Ep 1)
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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durampore. You're doing that thing of leaning right in and bellowing at people. Just chill, man. There we go. God's sake. Just, you know what? I'm very excited. You're full of vim and vigor because you've come off a flight and you've just had such fun telling me who you were sitting next to. So,

Who were you sitting next to on the flight that just got in? Well, I have to say, I didn't recognise him. And he was sort of under a baseball cap, sort of hiding his face. Was it Farrell? Was it the musical Supremo? No.

Ed Sheeran was off to play a gig in all places in Bhutan. So if you're listening to this episode, not Ed, but anyone else that happens to be in Bhutan, the improbable gig coming your way is Ed Sheeran.

Did you not charm him? Did you not tell him all about the Empire podcast? What's wrong with you? Well, I have to say it didn't look as if, A, he was particularly wanting a very long conversation at seven in the morning or five in the morning UK time this morning when we got into Delhi, any more than the day before my other little celeb spot of having... Wait a minute. So are you saying to me, you just saw Ed Sheeran on a flight?

This is very different to the story I anticipated. You said you sat next to him. I imagined like a whole wine diner. Oh, Ed, your musical stylings are so very good. I thought you'd do that. You know, just dazzle him with your musical knowledge. I did do a little bit of job. You looked at him. Did you? Yeah.

I didn't get the impression that he was a keen listener of the Empire podcast or indeed a reader of my Irvs. Oh, really, Ed? If your friends are there cheering, tell him he missed out on a treat. He could have had a chat with one of the most entertaining men in the world. I did my best to dazzle him with my charm, but I had to say that he didn't disappear into his iPods and his baseball cap. He could have been regaled with your tales of happiness.

knowledge of popular culture. But the air hostesses were very excited. There was lots of autograph hunting by the entire cabin crew. I cut you off in your oeuvre. Who was the other guy you saw yesterday? Well, the day before, I was probably at Davos giving a talk there. And I was being interviewed on a fire escape, actually, just because it was outside. Yeah.

And it was a nice bright spot to do an interview that was very quiet until this sort of entourage came thundering through the middle of the interview in the head of which was another David Beckham. Oh.

And I can exclusively reveal he has a lot more tats on his neck than you ever see on television. Very heavily tattooed. You heard it here first, listeners. All breaking news. This is very, very good. We don't normally do celeb gossip on Empire Point. Yes, we do. Who are you kidding? If we ever see him, we talk about them. We're that desperate.

And also dazzled. Look, right, concentration, bags of hush now, because we are here to talk about a brilliant and rather surprising moment in art history. When the East India Company's wish to record animals and plants of this new land that they were conquering with gay abandon led to the recruitment of some of the best artists in India at the time to illustrate flora,

fauna, animals they'd only dreamt of or heard of. And the result is this wonderful hybrid art that is called company school painting. And you are a massive fan. I mean, you are even more than Ed Sheeran's work. You're a fan of the company painting. Rather more of a fan of company school painting than Ed Sheeran or indeed David Beckham. I would swap the complete works of Beckham and Sheeran for a couple of very nice company school paintings. Okay. So what is it and why are you so fascinated by it?

So first of all, I think the term company school painting does it a disservice because it makes it sound like it's sort of produced by the East India Company. And what actually is happening is something much more interesting. In the process of trying to find commercially viable plants to sell, and of course, in the story of this, the most commercially viable thing the East India Company latches onto is opium and the opium poppies.

and also rubber. There's a whole variety of fortunes to be made for the company by taking an interest. So the East India Company, obviously, at its heart is a commercial company, and it didn't primarily exist to conquer land. It primarily existed to find things to trade.

And part of those things that it traded was plants and animals, as we talked with Satnam Sanghera in our last couple of episodes. And in order to find things to sell from the plant and botanical world, the East India Company recruits a whole lot of very uncommercially minded botanists.

who leap on the chance to be sent out to India, which is the exclusive preserve of the East India Company. You can't just go off and collect plants in 18th century India. You have to have an East India Company passport, and they're very jealously guarded. And so you find this group of enthusiasts for botany coming out of Oxford and particularly out of Edinburgh University, where there's a huge botanical movement going on.

And these guys find themselves in India. And then they have to have their plants illustrated. Today, you just take out your cell phone and photograph the plants or possibly do a proper studio shoot with amazing cameras and lighting. But the equivalent of that in the 18th century was to find existing brilliant Mughal artists. And we've talked in the Mughal series all about how

Among the many wonders of Mogul art were the botanical pictures done by Mansoor at the court of Jahangir. There was a tradition in India of painting animals. One of the other things I did between meeting Messrs. Beckham and Sheeran and getting back to my farm was going to the Mogul show at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

And seeing for the first time, actually, many of those Mansour pictures since we actually did the episode, I've only ever seen them as illustrations. And they had almost a whole room of the turkey, the zebra, a wonderful blue bull I'd never seen before, a nil guy. So what the company does is that these botanists recruit people from that tradition.

But also painters who are used to painting other things too. There's whole groups of painters on the Andhra coast who paint textiles and do lovely patterns and these famously beautiful Indian textiles of scrolls of plants and so on. I was going to ask you because people won't know. You know this backwards, forwards, and you do light up in a way that is phenomenal, like a firework when you talk about company paintings.

But there are different styles. We've talked about the Mughal style, but there is also a Punjabi style, a Bahari style, which is Bahari meaning from the mountains, a Tamil style. I mean, every part of India has a different sensibility towards art now.

as well. And so the company doesn't just draw from those Mansour school painters. They go and they seek out all the styles, don't they? Exactly right. And that's why I have always been rather unsure about the phrase company school painting. And when I did an exhibition of these paintings at the Wallace Collection called Forgotten Masters four years ago, just in the middle of lockdown, we produced this show. We never used the phrase company school painting. It was Indian painting for the East India Company.

Which is so much better because Company School suggests one style, one approach, and it isn't. It's a collection. What I also love about this, what you've told me about Company School painting, is that it is...

actually quite a democratizing process in art because they do go to the court painters. So you've got the very grand imperial painters like Gulam Ali Khan, for example. But you also get to the very humble Mucis who were leather workers who were deemed to be at that time untouchables who today are called Dalits. So I mean, that would have been unthinkable in a

court to have people from that caste and class painting in any meaningful way, but the company sought them out if they were good. And the company is very utilitarian. If these guys are capable of producing good likenesses of the plants or botany or the animal specimens which they're meant to be painting, then they're employed. And so you get

a vast variety of different sorts of painting happening in different botanic gardens. So the ones around Delhi are obviously very much more in a Mughal style, straightly representational. The sort of thing you're getting on the coast of Andhra Pradesh, where the local tradition of painting is painting scrolls and textiles,

is far more sort of imaginative. And, you know, the plants are made to almost do a dance across the page with their sort of scrolls going off in an improbable direction. It's a completely different approach to that in Delhi. I mean, the other democratisation is that, you know, the company is not an entity that commissions these things. It's people working for the East India Company. So you can get people from all tiers saying, do you know, I quite fancy a picture of a tiger, or I quite like that plant growing at the foothills of that

particular mountain. And so you have people from very different walks of life. I mean, soldiers, civil servants, diplomats, missionaries, judges, women. I mean, you know, they get to say as well, women, even the women get in on the act, but they all commission. And so that's why

Company painting is as vibrant and diverse as it is. What's interesting is that a lot of these enthusiastic botanists are sensitive enough to, for example, take an interest in the painters who are painting for them. They develop relationships. And so far more than in the art that precedes it, you're often aware of the identity of the painter. And they have a biography. They have a name.

And so one of the things we tried to do in this exhibition was to group this material under the names of the different artists who produced it. And that shouldn't be a revolutionary thing. There's not one, but two exhibitions that you've put together, one in New York and one in London, where you've curated and collected these things. I mean, you're saying that's what we tried to... You've not mentioned what you did, mate. So these were like two major exhibitions of company work. One of the nicest jobs I've ever had was pulling all this stuff together. Yeah.

First of all, was the one in New York, which is specifically about the art of Delhi called Princes and Painters. And then there was the one in the Wallace Collection more recently, which was from all over India. And that was called Forgotten Masters, Indian painting for the East India Company. And particularly the Wallace Collection show was beautifully designed by the museum with gorgeous colours.

And we had rooms for the different painters. And today we kind of assume that, you know, when we open a history of art book that we're

painting in the West is grouped by artists. So you have the Pre-Raphaelites with Burne-Jones and Rossetti, and you have the great Renaissance artists, whether it's Michelangelo or Leonardo or Raphael or whoever. And that is not the case often with the art of India. Often they just say Pahari. There's just a school called Pahari Painting where there's a lot of work done from an area. But the artists are not given identities or agencies. So

And this isn't just being sort of woke and right on. It's obviously vital to, if you're trying to understand what's going on, to understand the artists who are producing this and the backgrounds they come from and what's driving them. And so we worked out these extraordinary relationships between painters who were often trained to paint grand court scenes, images of Nawabs holding court with noblemen grouped around them, or maybe watching dancing girls or doing courtly things. And

Here they are later in their lives being hired by the East Indy Company to paint usually botanical scenes, sometimes birds, beasts, reptiles, snakes.

but also sort of local oddities. So there's a wonderful set of paintings called The Sheep Eater of Fatigar, who was a sadhu who was famous for sort of disemboweling sheeps and eating the whole thing from top to bottom. And the company officers were clearly fascinated by this sort of guy who performed this apparently almost as a sort of circus trick. And people commissioned lots of pictures of him disemboweling the sheep. And

Among the pictures which we get at this time are these very democratic images of Indian village scenes, sometimes done for colonial reasons. In other words, these are taxpayers whose identities the company wants to know. So you get the painterly equivalent of mugshots of villagers. But this is the first pictures in Indian art, certainly since maybe Ajanta in about sort of 100 B.C.,

where you're getting ordinary villagers being painted with all their sort of warts and all, one of them's lost an eye and others had smallpox. It's marvellous. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of the difference between those mannered photos from Victorian times of people sort of staring in the camera with deadness in their eyes. And then you've got those sort of Victorian street scenes where, you know, the early documenters of life are sort of taking these huge daguerreotypes of streets rather than a person. And they tell you so much more. Now, look, I want to go back

really, to the start of all of this. Because it is the late 1700s that you have artists who are flooding into the

the city of Lucknow. Now, Lucknow at this time in the late 1700s was at the height of the golden age. It was known as, what is it, the Monte Carlo, the Venice? I mean, it's the Rome of India. I've had all sorts of different descriptions for it. Or possibly a bit of 1970s Tehran and Monte Carlo crossed with a bit of Las Vegas and maybe a bit of Blindbourne. Blindbourne. So it was an artist magnet. And part of the reason I think it's really important to understand why artists were sort of flooding into Lucknow, it's because the

other major Mughal city, Delhi, had been looted and burned a few times. It was a poor, benighted place. And so people didn't have enough time to get their palates out, let alone start painting. So they all head to Lucknow, which is this nurturer

of talent, a place that appreciates art and beauty, its reputation, even now actually is linked with finesse. Lucknowi Punjabi, so Punjabi is a language I speak, is the sweetest form of Punjabi. It's very mannered. You go to Punjabi, it sounds like you're having a fight. I can say this, I'm Punjabi. But you go to other parts of Punjab and it's a very different sort of brusque language. But the Lucknow Punjabi and the Lucknow culture was

was high art, high living, high manners. And this is the place really, it's the nursery for much of what will become company art. Absolutely right. And there's this famous culture of the Tawafs, who we would call the courtesans, who in the culture of the time were much, much more. They were the school of manners and people sent their teenage sons off to the Kutis of the Tawafs

And there they would learn the art of courtly living, how to make conversation to women, how to pass a pan, how to recite poetry, when to recite poetry.

And the Nawabs were, on one hand, regarded, I think, as terrifically decadent, particularly by the British. But on the other, were regarded as people that spent their vast fortunes on art, on dance, on music. And they also attracted, as always is the case, if you have patrons who are open-fisted and are throwing money around at artists,

They produce a town around them, which is like, you know, Florence in the early 1400s or equivalents, you know, the Netherlands at the time of Rembrandt or whenever it is. And there is an extraordinary amount of music, of painting and of high civilization coming out of this. And it's a place where Europeans and Indians mix on an equal level.

footing in a way that's just not happening in the most of the rest of India. And when they do mix, they are impressed rather than sort of looking down on the natives. As you say, there's a reason to sort of look up. The British correspondent, the very famous journalist, William Russell, writes of his time in Lucknow as, not Rome, not Athens, not any city I have ever seen appears to me so striking and beautiful as this. So it isn't that sort of the kind of Orientalism that

makes us all go, which is, you know, oh, look, isn't it exotic, but slightly lower than us. It is an admiration that's going on. Yes. And people are passing, in a sense, culturally in both directions. On one hand, the Nawab society

sometimes amaze British visitors as turning up dressed in the uniform of a British admiral or even a clergyman at the church. Yes, yes. But at the same time, you have all these pictures of all these fabulous nabobs throwing away their East India Company breeches

and dressing in long Avadi gowns, lying back on carpets, hookers in their mouths as they're watching Nautch Girls. And there's all sorts of reasons you can be down on this, but it's rather a marvellous place. You've used two terms that we ought to explain. So the Nawabs are kind of the nobility, the people with the money, the people with the bling, the people with the cash who are native Indians. The Nawabs are the governors. They're the Mughal governors. They're the rulers. But the Nabob is a term that's given to white men who have come over to India who have

use the term, gone native. You know, who've sort of started fraternizing, falling in love with, having children with, and living a little bit too Indian, as the East India Company will eventually start feeling. But at the beginning, it happens. Now, tell us about some of the really interesting people in this company painting story. I mean, there's a whole world of strange Europeans who've come to Lucknow to make their fortunes. And these are not just sort of, you know, men.

there are two British mensabs who end up marrying the Nawabs. Bizarrely, one of the most beautiful mosques in Lucknow turns out to have been built for a British woman who converted to Islam and married the Nawab. And it's sitting there on the edge of the British residence, a woman called Miss Walters, who got sort of sucked into this world. And there is a wonderful character at the heart of the British end of this city. This is

around the residency building and a wonderful character, one of my favorite East India Company officers called Major William Palmer. And a portrait survives, probably by Zoffany, although art historians occasionally sort of have long debates about this,

And it's one of the most famous pictures of the time because it is the very antithesis of the kind of Curzon, racist, Raji world that we're so familiar with. In this picture, Palmer is sitting on a chair and he is gazing with love and adoration at his incredibly beautiful wife, who's a wonderful woman called Faiz Begum, who's a kind of mogul princess.

who is sitting below him. She's sitting on the floor, he's sitting on a chair. But she has on her lap her newborn baby boy with a little Muslim cap on his head. Two other children are looking in at the baby in their luck Navi gowns. Faiz's sister is sitting the far side of her brother-in-law. There are Ayahs.

And it's just a very charming image of a happy mixed race family from the mid 18th century, which you just, you don't imagine. You don't expect and you don't, but the other thing that's really striking about it is that the structure of the painting or rather the arrangement of the painting is very much reminds me of those ones with the adoration of the baby Jesus. The child, this mixed race child is the most important thing in the painting. So again, the stigma of having a mixed race relationship

or what they would become known as mongrel children, that stigma is nowhere to be seen in this picture because the radiance is coming from the mother and the mixed race child. Except, you know, it looks like the adoration of the baby. You've got sort of palm trees and exotic plants in the background, you know, and the man in the chair is wearing a very smart Western European suit. So yes, that's fantastic. Zophany, you mentioned Zophany that you think it's Zophany. Tell me that.

Am I right? Is there a really dark story? Or am I imagining it over Zoffany? There is a dark story, and it is true. Zoffany has the distinguishing mark of being the only royal academician that we know definitely to have been a cannibal. Yeah.

That we know for sure. Wait a minute. We have suspicions about a number of others. Yes, I mean, they look like they could. But what did he do? Why did Zoffany eat somebody? Who did he eat? I mean, there's so many questions. I remember a rumour, but just put some flesh on the bones of this story, would you? With pleasure.

So Zoffany is part of this extraordinary circle of Brits and Europeans, of which there are a great variety, who are attracted by the Nawab's wealth and come to try and make their fortunes.

And Zoffany, when he goes out to India, is still a struggling painter. By the time he comes back, he's an established master who knows that when he hits England, he'll be able to command great prices and already have a network of admirers because of the extraordinary work he's produced in Lucknow. But what he doesn't expect is that he is shipwrecked on the way home.

And it's like one of those stories of, you know, planes going down in the Andes and they end up having to eat the dead passengers and that sort of stuff. This is the same thing. In order to survive, they end up eating a second lieutenant who's... Oh my God. It's just awful. I shouldn't laugh. It's awful. And he's buried not very far from where we both live in West London. He's on Kew Green. Very appropriate for this story. You're kidding. Near Kew Gardens, just outside Kew Gardens.

Oh my goodness. Well, I'm going to go and have a look at that. Right. So that's the cannibal painter. Okay. Tell me about another of, as it happens, Major Palmer's friends, because I love the sound of Colonel Antoine Bollier. Tell me about Antoine Bollier. Bollier is another wonderful character. He's painted by Zoffany. There's one wonderful Zoffany, which I actually saw in Calcutta a fortnight ago. It's now up in the Victoria Memorial Museum.

And at the center of the picture is Zoffany painting away. And he's flanked by two friends. And we're going to talk about both of them. Poullier is the first. He's sitting there with a sort of beaver skin hat on. He looks like he's come out of sort of David Crockett. He looks like David Crockett. Exactly. He does. Yeah. That's on his head. And yet on his sort of shoulders is, you know, a very stiff East India Company jacket. And he's all dressed up with, you know, the full cravat and everything else you'd expect. And a particularly memorable pair of mustaches. What do you think?

what was called Marlboroughs in the 18th century. Anyway, Paulier is part of this world, and he is one of the very first Europeans to commission serially work from Lucknow artists.

And he is fascinated by the art of the Mughals. And we have a whole range of his correspondence, which is now in Paris in the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he corresponds with Mughal painters. Actually, these are almost the only letters in existence from patrons to Mughal artists. He can be quite peremptory at times, you know, go to Delhi, paint me the court, come back

immediately. And there's no question that he's the boss. But at other times, he is clearly in love with this whole world of Mughal painting and a great specialist and connoisseur in it. And his collection is now split up between London and Paris and Vienna. And he makes the decision, like Zoffany, to go back to Europe. But in his case, he chooses exactly the wrong time to go and buy a chateau in France with his earnings from the Noirs.

because he buys a Chateau in France in 1760.

Which, as your historical imagination... Hang on a minute. Just worked it out. So the man who lost his head over Indian painting and culture ends up losing his head? He goes to guillotine. Guillotine. He, like his friend Major Palmer, fell in love with not one, but two Indian wives. I mean, he had two. Isn't that right? A junior and a senior. And they're constantly squabbling. And their correspondence... I once went to the...

Archive de Savoie in France and got out the correspondence of many of this circle, which are kept there in the archives of a guy called General de Boyne. And General de Boyne is left with these two squabbling wives when Folier goes back. And there are reams of correspondence about the two women sort of continuing their catfight over the next 10 years.

But the key character who is at the centre of this whole network, the reason that Pauli and Zoffany are there and that they know each other, is the most important character of all. And this is a man called Claude Martin. Famous today because he set up two schools which still exist. The La Martinier schools. A very posh school, indeed.

In fact, it's sort of an Eton Harrow type thing. Exactly, in the Indian context. The Lucknow School still survives as a school to this day, and it's in the building he built as a sort of, at once, a mausoleum, a fortress, and a centre of operations.

And it was originally called Constantier. It's now known as La Martiniers. And on the facade are two fantastic East India Company lions, which are about three or four times life size.

And they have behind the eyes of the lions spaces so that you could put flaming torches into the eye sockets and light them up. So these wonderful lions would be sort of aflame with flames coming out of their mouths and eyes. And Claude Martin was born in Lyon in 1735. At 16, he signs up for the Compagnie d'Azanne, the French East India Company company.

He makes a first fortune as a sort of buccaneer businessman and an indigo planter. He then realizes that the company he designed is going down, and he crosses the lines and signs up with the British for purely pragmatic reasons. And in Lucknow, he makes a fortune providing all the luxuries to the noirs that they want, all the latest stuff from Europe.

But at the same time, with the fortune that he makes, allows him to operate as he imagines himself as a sort of David Hume or a Linnaeus character washed up on the shores of the Gomptee River. And he gets all the latest scientific and philosophical journals out of Paris.

For example, two years after the Montgolfier brothers have built a hot air balloon and traveled over Paris in it, Claude Martin, using the descriptions in French scientific journals, does the same in Lucknow and builds his own hot air balloon. And even more remarkable, and this is kind of, I think alone would be enough to immortalize him.

his appendix goes and he knows that he's going to die unless it's operated on, but he doesn't trust any of the Luab's doctors. So using a scientific journal out of Paris,

He removes his own appendix. Oh my God, he's a nutter. Successfully. And sews himself up again. He's a complete nutcase. Using a sort of do-it-yourself equivalent of a YouTube video. Can you imagine? I get queasy when I hear stories about people who remove their own teeth by tying some string to their tooth and the door. Completely crazy.

Of a different quantum. Look, I'm also really interested, I mean, apart from when he's not chopping himself up, he's so serious about his painting and his art that he imports no less than 17,000 sheets of European watercolour paper and gets, you know, a Lucknowy master to get this sort of team together to paint a series of natural histories, which are now some of the finest collections of these things known to man. Absolutely right. Yeah.

I think we're going to have to have a break there, but we're going to come back after the break to talk about Claude Martin and the birth of this new style of painting.

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Available for a limited time at participating restaurants. Tax not included. Prices may vary. Not valid with any other offer, discount or combo. Welcome back. So just before the break, William had introduced us to this rather extraordinary nutcase, Claude Martin, who is a huge patron of the art, also self-surgeon, who removed his own appendix, which I'm still reeling from. But this idea of wanting to create and sponsor and be a patron to so many artists is

He's so serious about it. It becomes actually a school, doesn't it? He's in Lucknow. He loves Lucknow. It becomes a Lucknow-y school of painting. Well, he is operating in a town that is absolutely packed to the gunnels. It's rather like arriving in LA today and finding it already full of actors, artists, writers, screenwriters, all these sort of people who have assembled around Hollywood.

The same is true of Claude Martin's Lucknow. So much have the Noirs poured their money into the arts that there is a huge pool of talent. And as you mentioned at the beginning, it's also been

partly serviced by the fact that Delhi at this period is almost unlivable then. The Afghan and Maratha armies going backwards and forwards over the ruins of Delhi. And many of the Delhi artists and painters and singers and dancers have fled to Lucknow and to Bengal, where it's more peaceful. And so Claude Martin has this dream of...

bringing together these two worlds. On one hand, the world of the 18th century enlightenment that he loves and misses in Europe, and which he's keeping tabs on by periodicals coming and whole libraries being sent out from France. And one of the key imports that arrives in a great series of boxes at Constantia for Claude Martin at this period is a massive multi-volume book called Les Oiseaux de France, which

which, over many volumes, has a complete set of descriptions of every bird that you can find in 18th century France with a painting opposite. The painting is in that sort of European botanical style whereby the bird is on a white background.

It's cut off from, in a sense, the world that it's connected with, other than sitting on a stump or on a branch of a tree. And it's painted in fantastic scientific detail. And this is all connected with the attempts of Linnaeus, the French zoologist and botanist, to classify the world, to enumerate and index and archive things.

the world around him. Claude Martin thinks, "Great, I can do this here. There's absolutely nothing that they've done in Paris that I can't do as well or better using the local artists of Lucknow." As he's already connected with the court and with the Noirs, he just starts employing the Lucknow artists to

try and do the same as the Les Roisaux de France had done in France to do it in Lac-Nam. And there are a whole series of very comical early versions where the local style to paint paintings had been to produce a figure of maybe a local mullah or a nobleman or a leading merchant.

standing in a perfectly drawn portrait on a landscape where there are these tiny little trees and... And ruins in the background. Yeah, like a lily bush. And beautiful, romantic... Yes, exactly. Like they're huge sort of...

monsters rising up from the middle of it. It looks odd enough when it's a human being, a mullah or a nuab painted in this style. But it looks absolutely extraordinary when a bird, like a stork, and there's a particularly famous adjutant stork painted in Latin America at this period, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

where this sort of Godzilla bird rises above the landscape as if it's sort of 500 feet tall. Run for your lives. The gigantic stalk is coming for us. So he decides white backgrounds is the way to go, is he?

So after experimenting in the local style and allowing the artists, in a sense, to paint how they would normally paint any portrait, because these are sort of animal portraits as much as natural history studies. You very much feel that the artist is trying to capture the spirit and the character of the animals as much as their physical appearance.

And so after that, he decides to go more European and he tells the artists not to do these landscapes, but to follow Les Rois de France and just have white backgrounds. And a whole set of these paintings called the Lucknow Menagerie appeared on the London art market. No one had ever seen them before about 20 years ago.

And they're some of the very greatest late 18th century Indian paintings ever painted. I mean, just give us an idea of scale. How big are these? They're not necessarily very big because a lot of these artists painted, you know, miniatures, as the name suggests. Often they're an A4 or an A3 sheet of paper at the max. But it's the level of detail that they managed to get. I mean, it is exquisite. And I've got one particular favourite one that I just love, which is

a red-headed merlin, in other words, a sort of kestrel. And if you sit next to this painting and use a magnifying glass, you can see every single filament of every feather on that bird. And the artist has used one of these squirrel hair brushes to capture every single stroke of every single feather.

that this bird has. And you can see them enjoying it, rather like their counterparts enjoy doing the patterns on a complicated Kashmiri shawl, all those sort of paisley patterns, hypnotically swirling in these minutely observed gradations of shade. I just want to remind people about the squirrel hairbrush, because if you missed our previous episode, this is such a good story, it's worth repeating. But the squirrel hairbrush, you have to, as the artist, go and capture a squirrel,

humanely and take a hair. One. One hair. Well, just one hair, just the perfect hair, and then use that and then release said squirrel. So no squirrels are heard in the process of creating, which I love. Look, I mean, you're having so much fun that I didn't want to remind you, but I will remind you now. This is part of a series about gardens and you've talked about birds. Are plants figuring prominently in the Martin Collection? So not in the first round.

Claude Martin produces a first round of pictures, which are almost entirely birds. And I think this was directly inspired by the arrival of this set of French bird paintings. He said, I just want to do that for luck now. But about five years later, he decides to do drawings of botany.

And this is where, in a sense, our story begins because I'm just towards the end of this episode. Did you see my shoulders just sink into the ground? Oh, for God's sake. It's a very Empire pod. We're just getting to our... This is where our story begins. It's quite the preamble even for you. Go on.

And this actually was one of the great discoveries of our show. And I was very lucky to work with one of my favorite art historians, who is a wonderful man called Henry Nolte, who for I think his entire career of 40 years sat cataloging the extraordinary paintings in the Scottish Botanic Garden Collection in Edinburgh. And

And no one, I think, had ever really studied this stuff properly until Henry came along. And he is a botanist. He can tell every tiny variation between different subspecies of different sorts of plant. And I was very lucky because when this exhibition happened, Henry had just retired from Edinburgh.

and had time on his hand for the first time in many years. And I suggested that he go and see what there was in Kew, the archives that Satnam Sanghera was talking about on our previous episode. And it turned out that the archives in Kew were very badly catalogued, and that there's no overall sort of card indexing of their collection. And instead, things are just

amassed under the different genres of plant. So ferns are in one big pile and orchids in another. And into these bundles are often tens of thousands of pictures made in different times of these different flowers. And it doesn't matter whether they're produced by artists in China, British artists working in Africa or in North America, they're just grouped under the genus

And Henry used his retirement to go in. And in the end, I think he was there for about six months.

He found in the Kew collection, I think I'm right in saying 658 drawings of birds by Claude Martin, which were associated with 600s of plants and 606 of reptiles. There we go. We got to the plants in the end. And these were shown for the first time in our show. What a find. It was very exciting. It was a very, very exciting moment.

Well, look, we got there in the end. We got to a plant. But I promise you, there'll be more plants in the next. And we've got a sort of a baton handover because you heard William talk earlier about two major schools of this company painting, one in Lucknow, the other in Calcutta. And the reason we can do a baton hand is that a man named Impey is a guest painter.

of Martin. And this is how a whole brilliant story with more plants begins in our next episode. And just remember, if you want to hear this entire mini-series on gardens and imperialism, all you have to do is join our club. That's empirepoduk.com. That's empirepoduk.com. And you will get a newsletter. You'll get discounts on some of the books that we talk about. You'll get first dibs on

on tickets, and we are going on tour. But most of all, you'll be part of our wonderful family and get to chat to each other on Discord and get special bonus episodes. So all of that if you join. And also, you get to binge. And who doesn't like a binge? So till we meet again, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Dribble.