Study of a Yellow-footed Green Pigeon, illustration from the Rind Album

Description

This painting is an example of Indian Company School painting. As the British East India Company expanded its activities in South Asia during the late 1700s, great numbers of its employees moved from England to carve out new lives for themselves in India. As they traveled throughout the country and encountered novel flora and fauna, stunning ancient monuments, and "exotic" new people, they wanted to capture these images to send or take home. Whereas a modern tourist would rely on a camera for such a task, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers hired Indian painters. The works produced by these artists, undertaken in a European style and palette, are known as "Company" paintings. They are characterized by the use of watercolors (instead of gouache, which was used in traditional Indian paintings) and by the appearance of linear perspective and shading. This charming yellow-footed green pigeon—the state bird of Mahashtra, in the west-central region of the subcontinent—comes from an album commissioned by James Nathaniel Rind (d. 1814), who lived in India between 1778 and 1801.