Page from the "Impey Album": Pied Bush Chat Perched on a Flowering Branch (Primary Title)
Shaikh Zayn-al-Din, Indian, active 1777 - 1783 (Artist)
The British were so fascinated by India that they hired local artists working in Westernized styles to create pictures of the country’s plants, animals, birds, people, trades, crafts, and so on. Known as “Company Paintings” after the English East India Company, these pictures were often arranged in albums and taken back to England as souvenirs. The most impressive natural history studies by Company artists are those commissioned between 1777 and 1782 by Lady Mary Impey of Calcutta (Kolkata): large-scale watercolors on European paper of India’s birds, animals, fish, and plants taken directly from nature.
This picture by Shaikh Zaya al-Din shows a bird identified in an inscription as a “Grey Peedan,” a local name for the pied bush chat. The sparrow-sized bird, common across North India and Pakistan, perches on the branch of a flowering tree, probably Mimusops elengi, the bullet wood tree. The three painters in Lady Impey’s employ were natives of Patna in the eastern Indian state of Bihar. They were likely trained there in the naturalistic Mughal-derived style and later relocated to Calcutta in search of patronage from the prosperous English community headquartered there.
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