INDIAN SCHOOL, 19TH CENTURY
The Taj Mahal
date of watermark 1813RCIN 932750
The East India Company took the cities of Agra and Delhi in 1803. Company engineers responsible for the upkeep and restoration of the cities’ dilapidated buildings commissioned local artists to make architectural studies of the Mughal structures to use as working drawings. These were idealised views of what the buildings would have looked like when first constructed rather than how they appeared at the time they were painted. Such paintings soon became popular collectors’ items.