INDIA, COMPANY SCHOOL, 19TH CENTURY

Portraits and genre scenes on thin sheets of mica were popular among the British in India in the nineteenth century. Subjects for these paintings include gods, goddess, trades people, and botanical studies. Mica paintings were often sold in firqas, or sets mounted into albums, or in groups of loose sheets. The medium, thin sheets of mica, were previously used by Indian artists to preserve tracings of their ancestral paintings, but by the early nineteenth century were popular as standalone paintings among British patrons, possibly due to their resemblance to paintings on glass which were contemporaneously popular in Europe. Due to the sheer volume of works produced and the varied subjects and portraiture, these works offer extensive documentation on every day life in nineteenth century India. An extensive collection of over 700 paintings on mica are kept as a study collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
‌The present lot includes a seventy page album, with two paintings mounted onto each page and ten loose mica paintings. A sixty-one page album of mica paintings from Murshidabad recently sold at Christie's London 25 June 2020, lot 108 for GBP 11,250.