Impey Album

The Impey Album was a collection of paintings commissioned by Elijah Impey (1732–1809) and his wife Mary, née Reade (1749–1818), of the animals in their menagerie in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, where Elijah was chief justice of the Supreme Court.[1]

Indian Roller on Sandalwood by Zain ud-Din, now in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art

Between 1777 and 1782,[2] the Impeys hired local artists to paint the various birds, animals and native plants, life-sized where possible, and their natural surroundings. The collection, often known as the Impey Album, is an important example of Company style painting. The three artists who are known were Sheikh Zain ud-Din,[3] Bhawani Das, and Ram Das.[4] More than half the over 300 paintings[4] were of birds.

Mary also kept extensive notes about habitat and behaviour, which were of great use to later biologists such as John Latham in his work on Indian birds.

The collection was dispersed in an auction in 1810, and several pieces are in various museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,[4] with three in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London,[5] and eighteen in the Radcliffe Science Library of the University of Oxford.[6]

The twelve pictures (eleven by Zain ud-Din) given to the Radcliffe Science Library are now on loan to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford,[7] and between October 2012 and April 2013 were exhibited at the Ashmolean as part of an exhibition entitled Lady Impey's Indian Bird Paintings.[2]

An exhibition, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, which opened in December 2019 at the Wallace Collection in London reunited about 30 paintings from the album.[1][8][9] It was scheduled to run until April 2020,[9] but like many such events was curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic.[10]

References
  1. "The forgotten Indian artists of British India". BBC News. 30 November 2019. Retrieved 30 November 2019.
  2. "Lady Impey's Indian Bird Paintings". Ashmolean Museum. 2013. Retrieved 2016-11-23.
  3. Also known as Sheikh Zain al-Din
  4. Ekhtiar, Maryam D., ed. (2011). Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in The Metropolitan Museum. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. p. 401. ISBN 978-1-58839-434-7.
  5. "V&A collections database: Impey". Victoria and Albert Museum.
  6. Cannon-Brookes, Caroline (24 February 2013). "Review of 'Lady Impey's Indian Bird Paintings'". British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Retrieved 30 November 2019.
  7. Harle, James C. (1987). Indian Art in the Ashmolean Museum. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum. p. 84. ISBN 9780907849520.
  8. Jones, Jonathan (3 December 2019). "Forgotten Masters review – the natural history geniuses robbed by the British empire". The Guardian. Retrieved 4 December 2019.
  9. "Exhibition - Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company". Wallace Collection. Retrieved 30 November 2019.
  10. "An update from the Wallace Collection". Wallace Collection. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
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