Stage 1What Painting Is, and How to Use This Guide

A painting is coloured matter fixed to a surface on purpose. The definition is plain because it has to stretch from a handprint on a rock shelter to a canvas at auction, and because it points at the two questions every painter and every owner of paintings must answer sooner or later: what is this made of, and how long will it last?

Every paint has two parts. The pigment is the colour, a fine powder that does not dissolve. The binder is the glue that holds the powder together and fastens it to the surface. Change the binder and you change the medium: gum arabic makes watercolour and gouache, egg yolk makes tempera, a drying oil makes oil paint and an acrylic polymer makes acrylic. The same ultramarine blue can sit in all four. Most of Part I follows from that one idea.

Two hobbies in one book

Making paintings and owning them usually get separate books. They belong together. A painter who has fought to lay a flat wash looks at a watercolour on a gallery wall with different eyes, and a collector who has spent years looking closely at paintings has taken, without meaning to, a long course in colour and composition. Plenty of people do both: they paint at weekends and buy, slowly, the work of people who paint better than they do.

The two halves also share a problem. A canvas you finished last year and a print you bought last month face the same enemies — light, damp, heat, insects and careless hands — and in most Indian homes those enemies are stronger than in the countries where most conservation advice is written. That is why the Storage and Preservation band is the longest section of the book, and why it covers both kinds of work.

Who this is for, and how it is arranged

It is written for four readers at once: the complete beginner who has not yet bought a brush; the practising painter who wants to know why a colour faded or a canvas cracked; the collector who needs to read an edition number, a provenance and an auction catalogue without being fooled; and the reader who simply enjoys a good story about Mughal workshops, a lithographic press near Lonavala or a poet who took up painting in his late sixties.

Part I (Stages 2 to 8) is the making: paint and its labels, the media, surfaces and tools, colour and composition, practice and safety. Part II (Stages 9 to 13) is collecting — originals and prints, provenance, buying and fakes — followed by three stages on storage, framing and conservation (Stages 14 to 16). Part III (Stages 17 to 22) is the Indian story, from the Mughal studios to Madhubani, the modern market and the law on older work.

Three kinds of box run through the text. First Steps boxes say what a beginner can do, cheaply, today. For the Painter boxes carry the codes, numbers and market detail that a serious painter or collector needs. Sidebars tell a story or make an argument.

Stage 2Pigments, Labels and Lightfastness

Pigment, dye and binder

A pigment is a coloured particle that does not dissolve in its binder; it sits in the paint film like sand in mortar. A dye dissolves and stains whatever it touches. Dyes give brilliant, transparent colour and are the basis of most markers, fountain-pen inks and bottled coloured inks, but as a class they fade far faster than pigments. A lake is a dye fixed onto an inert powder so that it behaves like a pigment; the old madder and cochineal crimsons are lakes, and they share the dye's weakness in light.

Pigments come from four broad sources. Earths — ochres, siennas and umbers — are iron-oxide clays, dug, washed and ground: cheap, stable and among the oldest colours in use. Minerals such as lapis lazuli and malachite supplied the blues and greens of Renaissance Italy and Mughal India alike. Manufactured inorganic pigments are metal compounds made in a works: titanium white, the cadmiums and cobalts, and synthetic ultramarine, first made in the 1820s, which ended the long reign of lapis. Synthetic organic pigments come from the chemical industry: the phthalocyanine blues and greens of the 1930s, the quinacridones of the late 1950s, the pyrrole reds of the 1980s. Many of the most lightfast colours on a modern shelf belong to this last group, which surprises people who assume that natural means durable.

Reading the label

The colour name on a tube is marketing. The useful information is in the small print, above all the Colour Index Generic Name, a code from the Colour Index International, the reference published by the Society of Dyers and Colourists and the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists. It reads P for pigment, then letters for the colour family (W white, Y yellow, O orange, R red, V violet, B blue, G green, Br brown, Bk black), then a number. PB29 is ultramarine whoever makes it.

The code lets you compare honestly. Two differently named blues from two makers may both be PB15, phthalocyanine blue. A "sap green" may be three pigments in one tube. And a paint called Cadmium Red Hue contains no cadmium: hue on a label means an imitation made from other pigments. That is not a fraud, and hues are often the safer choice (see Stage 8), but it is not the named pigment.

• Grade. Artists' or professional paint carries more pigment and less filler than student paint, which also uses more hues. Student paint is fine for learning; the difference shows when mixes turn muddy sooner.
• Series. Within an artists' range, a series number or letter is a price band that follows the cost of the pigment. Cobalts sit high, earths low.
• Opacity and staining. Opacity is usually a small square, empty for transparent and filled for opaque, but symbols vary, so read the key on the maker's colour chart.

Lightfastness

Lightfastness is a colour's resistance to fading or darkening in light. ASTM International, the American standards body, rates pigments in a given medium from I (excellent) and II (very good) through III (fair) to IV and V (poor and very poor); paint that meets its specifications for artists' paints must rate I or II. The Blue Wool Scale, common on European paints, runs from 1 (fades fast) to 8 (most resistant), each step needing roughly twice as much light as the one below to show change. As a rough guide, Blue Wool 7 and 8 correspond to ASTM I and 6 to ASTM II. Some makers add their own grades; Winsor & Newton's run AA, A, B and C.

For anything you will sell, give away or want to keep, use colours rated ASTM I or II, or Blue Wool 7 or 8. Treat these with suspicion:

• genuine alizarin crimson (PR83), which fades in thin washes and pale tints; most makers now offer a permanent substitute
• fluorescent and "opera" pinks, which owe their glow to dyes
• dye-based coloured inks and markers, however bright they look on the day
• any paint with no pigment code or rating on the label

The word "permanent" in a colour's name is a name, not a rating.

Stage 3Watercolour, Gouache and Ink

Watercolour

Watercolour is pigment bound in gum arabic, the dried sap of acacia trees, usually with a little glycerine or honey to keep it soluble. It is transparent: light passes through the paint, reflects off the paper and comes back through the colour, which is where its glow comes from. The paper is your only true white, so lights are planned first and the painting is built from light to dark. Mistakes can be softened but rarely hidden.

Most of the craft is managing water. Wet-in-wet means dropping colour into damp paper, where it spreads and blurs; wet-on-dry gives crisp edges. A glaze is a transparent wash laid over a dry one to deepen or shift it. A bloom, the ragged "cauliflower" edge, forms when wetter paint runs back into a drying wash; beginners fight it and experienced painters use it. Washes dry noticeably lighter than they look wet, which is why first paintings tend to look pale.

Pans suit travel and sketching; tubes release colour faster for big washes. It is the same paint. Liquid masking fluid reserves small whites, but lift it within a day or two: left for weeks, especially in heat, it can bond to the paper and tear the surface when removed.

Gouache

Gouache has the same binder with far more pigment, and sometimes a white filler, which makes it opaque. It dries to a flat, velvety matt, and light can be painted over dark, which makes it forgiving and ideal for illustration, design and studies. It has two quirks. It re-wets, so a new layer can lift the one underneath if you scrub. And its values shift as it dries, darks usually drying lighter and lights darker, so test mixes on a scrap first. Thick gouache cracks if the paper flexes, which matters in storage (see Stage 14).

Designers' gouache was made for artwork destined for the printing press, and some of its colours were never meant to last; check codes and ratings as in Stage 2. Acrylic gouache looks similar but dries water-resistant and does not re-wet. The opaque, gum-bound colour on burnished paper used by Mughal and Rajput painters (see Stage 17) is a close relative of gouache, which is one reason those paintings are so easily harmed by damp and handling.

Ink

Traditional black ink is carbon: soot bound with animal glue. East Asian ink sticks are ground with water on an inkstone; bottled carbon ink is sold in English as India or Indian ink, although the recipe came from China. Carbon black does not fade. Waterproof drawing inks add shellac so that a dry line survives washes laid over it; they also ruin any pen or brush left to dry with ink in it.

Brush and ink is the best school of value there is. One black diluted to four or five strengths can make a complete landscape, and it teaches more about light than a box of forty colours.

For work meant to last, avoid two kinds. Iron-gall ink, the brown-black of old manuscripts, is acidic and slowly eats through paper. Coloured drawing inks and most fountain-pen inks are dyes, and many fade within months in daylight.

Stage 4Acrylic, Oil and Tempera

Acrylic

Acrylic paint is pigment in an acrylic polymer emulsion: tiny droplets of plastic suspended in water, which is why wet acrylic looks milky. As the water evaporates the droplets fuse into a flexible, water-resistant film, and the milky binder turns clear, so colours dry a little darker than they look on the palette.

It is fast, cleans up with water, and can be thinned to washes, built up thick or used as collage glue on almost any grease-free surface. The speed is also its vice: paint on the palette skins over in minutes in a warm room, and paint that dries in a brush ruins it. Keep brushes wet while you work and wash them with soap as soon as you stop. Mediums change the handling without weakening the film — gloss and matt mediums for glazes, gels for body — and a retarder slows drying, which makes it the most useful bottle on the table in an Indian summer. Oil can be painted over dry acrylic; acrylic must never be painted over oil, because it will not grip.

In heat the dry film softens and turns faintly tacky, so fresh acrylic paintings can stick to each other, to glass or to bubble wrap (see Stage 14).

Oil

Oil paint is pigment ground in a drying oil, usually linseed, sometimes safflower or poppy for paler whites and blues. It does not dry by evaporation. The oil takes up oxygen from the air and slowly hardens into a solid film, a chemical process called oxidation. A thin layer is touch-dry in days; a thick one can stay soft underneath for months, and the film goes on changing for years.

That slowness is the attraction. Oil stays open long enough to blend on the canvas, to rework a passage for an afternoon, or to wipe out and start again. It gives the deepest darks and the richest textures of any medium, and a well-made oil painting on a sound ground can last for centuries.

One rule matters above the rest: fat over lean. Each layer should hold a little more oil than the one beneath it, so that the upper layers stay flexible while the lower ones harden. Begin with paint thinned with solvent (lean) and add oil or medium as you go (fat). Put a lean, solvent-heavy layer over a fat one and it will crack as it dries.

The traditional thinner is turpentine; many painters now use odourless mineral spirits, a refined petroleum solvent with the smelliest fractions removed. Odourless does not mean harmless (see Stage 8). You can also paint with no solvent at all, thinning with oil and cleaning brushes in vegetable oil and then soap, or use water-mixable oils, made with a modified oil that thins and washes out with water.

Two long-term notes. Linseed oil yellows a little when kept in the dark and bleaches back in light, so a painting that has spent years in a cupboard may come out looking warmer. And conservation research has linked zinc white in oil to brittle layers that can split apart, so many painters keep it out of grounds and underpainting.

Tempera

Egg tempera is pigment bound with egg yolk and a little water, painted on a rigid panel coated with gesso, a smooth white ground of chalk or gypsum in animal glue. It dries in seconds, cannot be laid on thickly or blended wet, and is built up in thin hatched strokes, layer over layer. The result is clear, luminous and slow to yellow, and it has survived on Italian altarpieces and Orthodox icons for more than six hundred years. Its classic manual is Cennino Cennini's Il Libro dell'Arte, written around 1400.

The story that Jan van Eyck invented oil painting is a legend. Drying oils were known long before him; what the fifteenth-century Netherlandish painters did was to refine oil glazing so well that oil went on to displace tempera across Europe. Older books also use "tempera" loosely for any paint with a water-soluble binder such as glue or gum, and describe Indian murals and miniatures that way. Egg is only one such binder.

Stage 5Surfaces, Grounds, Brushes and Tools

Paper

Good paper is the best money a beginning watercolourist spends. Cotton (rag) paper takes water evenly, survives scrubbing and lifting, and does not yellow. Wood-pulp paper is cheaper, cockles more and makes washes streaky. Look for acid-free, meaning made without the acidity that turns cheap paper brown and brittle, and ideally 100 per cent cotton.

Weight is given in grams per square metre (gsm). At 300 gsm paper takes a wash with modest buckling; at 640 gsm it barely moves; below about 200 gsm it cockles badly unless it is stretched — soaked, taped to a board with gummed brown paper tape and dried flat, so that it tightens like a drum. Surface comes as hot-pressed (smooth, for detail and ink), cold-pressed, also called NOT (a gentle tooth, the all-rounder), and rough. Paper is also sized, with gelatine or a synthetic, so that paint sits on it rather than sinking in as it would into blotting paper.

India has a long tradition of handmade paper, with Sanganer near Jaipur a well-known centre, and handmade cotton-rag sheets are widely sold as khadi paper. Test any handmade sheet for sizing before a serious painting. Oil on bare paper is a mistake: the oil soaks in and makes the paper brittle, so seal or prime it first.

Canvas and panels

Cotton duck is the everyday canvas: affordable, even, and quick to respond to changes in humidity. Linen, woven from flax, is stronger, stiffer and dearer, and the traditional choice for work meant to last. Canvas is stretched over a wooden frame. A stretcher has corner joints with small wooden wedges called keys that can be tapped in to tighten the fabric; a strainer has fixed corners. Canvas boards, canvas glued over card, are fine for studies but warp and are not archival.

Rigid panels of hardboard, plywood or aluminium composite suit fine detail and small work. Seal wood-based panels on all sides before priming, because water-soluble impurities in the board can migrate into acrylic layers and stain them yellow-brown.

Grounds

A ground is the layer between the support and the paint. It gives the surface its tooth (texture) and its absorbency, and it protects the fabric, since oil in direct contact with canvas makes the fibres brittle. The traditional oil ground was a coat of size, an animal glue, followed by an oil-based white. Most ready-primed canvases today carry an acrylic dispersion ground sold as "gesso", which shares only its colour with true gesso and suits both acrylic and oil. True chalk-and-glue gesso is rigid and cracks if flexed, so it belongs on panels, never on canvas.

Brushes, knives and the rest

Sable holds the most water and keeps the finest point, at a price. Squirrel makes soft, thirsty wash brushes; stiff hog bristle is the traditional oil brush; and synthetics, much improved, are right for acrylic, which ruins natural hair. In India, brushes of mongoose hair are illegal: the mongoose is protected under the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972, and enforcement raids have seized such brushes in bulk. Buy from sellers who say what the hair is.

The basic shapes are the round, the flat, the filbert (a flat with a rounded tip), the rigger for long thin lines and the mop for washes. Wash brushes in soap and water, reshape the head, and dry them flat or tip down; never leave them standing on their hairs in a jar. A painting knife, thin and cranked, lays on thick paint; a palette knife mixes it.

Beyond that you need an easel or a sloping board, a palette (a sheet of glass over grey paper works well for acrylic and oil), rags, lidded jars, masking tape and a hand mirror. A painting seen reversed in a mirror shows errors of drawing and balance that your eye has stopped noticing.

Stage 6Colour, Value and Composition

Three properties of colour

Every colour has three independent properties, a framework set out by the American painter Albert Munsell in the early twentieth century. Hue is its name on the colour wheel: red, blue-green. Value is how light or dark it is. Chroma is its intensity, from grey to the most saturated version of that hue. Beginners think mostly about hue. Painters who improve start thinking about value and chroma, because those do most of the work.

Value carries form and light. A painting with the right values is convincing in almost any colours; one with muddled values looks flat however lovely its hues. Photograph your painting in greyscale on a phone: if it falls apart, the problem is value, not colour.

Mixing

Paint mixing is subtractive. Each pigment absorbs part of the light, so every addition takes something away and mixtures drift towards dark and dull. Mud comes from too many pigments in one mix, not from any particular colour; keep most mixes to two pigments, three at most.

No real pigment is a pure primary. Every red leans towards orange or towards violet, every blue towards green or violet, which is the logic behind the split-primary palette of Stage 3: a warm and a cool version of each primary. Quinacridone rose and ultramarine, both leaning violet, make a clean violet; an orange-leaning red with the same blue makes a dull brown-purple.

Complementary colours sit opposite each other on the wheel and neutralise each other. Ultramarine and burnt sienna give a range of warm and cool greys that many watercolourists use instead of black. White lowers chroma and cools a colour, which is why tints can look chalky; black added to yellow gives olive green, not dark yellow.

Colour is relative

A grey looks warm beside blue and cool beside orange. The French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul described this simultaneous contrast in the nineteenth century while directing the dyeing at the Gobelins tapestry works, and Josef Albers built a celebrated course of exercises around such effects in Interaction of Color (1963). The lesson for the easel: judge every colour against its neighbours on the painting, never on the palette.

Value and composition

Composition is the arrangement of shapes, values and edges so that the eye travels where you intend. Most of it is decided before any paint is used.

• Thumbnails. Make three or four sketches the size of a playing card, trying different crops and formats. Most failed paintings could have been saved at this point in thirty seconds.
• Big shapes, few values. Simplify the subject into three to five value masses. Squinting blurs the detail and shows the masses. The Japanese word notan is often used for a two-value design of light and dark.
• A focal point. The eye goes to the greatest contrast: darkest dark against lightest light, the sharpest edge, the purest colour. Put it where you want attention, and let nothing else compete with it.
• Edges. Hard edges advance and attract; soft and lost edges let forms turn and recede.
• Placement. Dividing the rectangle roughly into thirds is a starting point, not a law. Avoid tangents, where two shapes just touch and create an awkward tension, and do not put the horizon or the subject dead centre unless you mean to.
• Rest. Leave quiet areas. A painting with detail everywhere has emphasis nowhere.

Stage 7A Practice Path from First Sketches

Talent is mostly the name people give to practice they did not see. The painters who improve are rarely those who began with the most facility. They are the ones who kept going through the long stretch when their taste was better than their hands.

Draw first, and keep drawing

Drawing is the skeleton of painting. You need not become a skilled draughtsman before picking up a brush, but a small sketchbook carried every day does more for your painting than most courses. Draw from life whenever you can: objects on a table, people at a bus stop, a street seen from a tea stall. Ten minutes a day beats three hours on a Sunday.

A first year

Habits that compound

• Work small and often. Twenty small paintings teach more than two large ones, because each is a complete set of decisions.
• Paint the same subject again. A series of one view or object shows you exactly what changed.
• Copy to learn. Copying a painting you admire, stroke by stroke, shows how it was made. Label copies as copies, never sign them with the original artist's name, and ask before copying in a museum gallery; many require permission.
• Be careful with photographs. Photographs flatten values, crush shadows and distort shapes near the edges. Use your own as notes alongside sketches, not instead of looking. Other people's photographs are their copyright.
• Keep a log. Date every painting and note the surface, the pigments and any varnish. It charts your progress, and it becomes the record described in Stage 16.
• Show the work. A class, a sketching group or a friend who will tell you what is not working is worth more than praise. The international Urban Sketchers network has groups in several Indian cities, and many art colleges and museums run short courses and weekend workshops.

The plateau

Every painter hits stretches where nothing seems to improve. They are usually the periods when taste is pulling ahead of skill, and they end by working through them, not by buying new materials. A month in a different medium, scale or subject often breaks the stall.

Stage 8Studio Safety

Painting is a safe hobby that a great many people practise carelessly. Most of the risk comes from a handful of materials and a handful of habits, and all of it can be managed. The advice here is deliberately conservative. Where a product's label or safety data sheet says something stricter, follow the label.

How materials get into you

There are three routes. Breathing in solvent vapour, spray mist or dust from dry pigment, pastel and sanding is the most serious. Swallowing happens by way of hands, food and the old habit of shaping a brush tip with the lips. Skin contact matters for solvents, which pass through skin and cause dermatitis, and far less for dry paint. Control dust and vapour and you have controlled most of the risk.

Ventilation

Work with a steady flow of fresh air across the room: an open window on one side and an exhaust fan in another, blowing out, placed so that vapour is pulled away from your face rather than past it. A closed, air-conditioned room is the worst place to use solvent, because the vapour simply recirculates, and a household air purifier is no substitute for fresh air. If you get a headache, feel dizzy or sick, or your eyes sting, stop, go into fresh air and improve the ventilation before you carry on.

Solvents and oily rags

• Use as little solvent as possible, in a jar with a lid that stays closed when you are not dipping a brush. Let used solvent stand; the pigment settles and the clear liquid on top can be reused.
• Never wash your hands in solvent. Wipe paint off with a rag, then use soap and water, or a little vegetable oil followed by soap.
• Solvents are flammable. Keep them away from gas stoves, lamps, diyas and incense.
• Rags soaked in linseed oil or oil paint can catch fire on their own. The oil gives off heat as it oxidises, and a crumpled pile traps it. Spread used rags flat outdoors to dry hard before discarding them, or keep them under water in a closed metal tin.
• Wear nitrile gloves; thin latex gloves are a poor barrier against most painting solvents.

Toxic pigments

A few pigments are hazardous because of the metals in them. As wet paint from a tube they are low risk, provided you keep them off your hands and out of your mouth. As dust they are a real hazard: never sand dried paint that contains them, never spray them, and do not grind dry pigment without training and proper protection.

Hue versions of most of these colours are made with safer pigments. They are the sensible choice for beginners, for children and for anyone who paints with their fingers or chews a brush.

Habits

• No eating, drinking or smoking where you paint, and wash your hands before doing any of them. Never shape a brush tip with your lips.
• Clean up with a damp cloth or mop. Sweeping and dry dusting put dust back into the air.
• Spray fixatives and varnishes outdoors, away from other people, and never in a closed room.
• A paper or cloth mask does nothing against solvent vapour. For spraying or dusty work, wear a properly fitted respirator with the right filters: particle filters for dust, organic-vapour cartridges for solvents.
• Keep studio jars, knives and palettes out of the kitchen, and never store paint or solvent in a food or drink container.
• Children should use products made and labelled for children. If you are pregnant or trying to be, talk to your doctor before using solvents or metal pigments.

Labels and disposal

Many art materials state that they conform to ASTM D4236, the American standard for labelling chronic health hazards in art materials. The Art & Creative Materials Institute's AP seal marks products it certifies as non-toxic, and its CL seal marks products that need the cautions printed on them. European products carry hazard pictograms. Every reputable maker publishes a safety data sheet for each product; keep copies for your solvents, mediums and metal-pigment colours.

Pour neither solvent nor pigment sludge down any drain. Let solids settle and dry, wrap them and put them out with the rubbish, and ask your municipal body how to dispose of used solvent. If paint or solvent is swallowed or splashed into the eyes, or if a rash, breathing trouble or other symptoms persist after you leave the studio, see a doctor and take the product label with you.

Stage 9Originals, Editions and Reproductions

The first question to ask of any picture for sale is not who made it but what kind of object it is. Three very different things hang on the same walls, often described in the same words, at prices a hundred times apart.

Three kinds of object

A unique original — a painting, drawing or watercolour — exists once. A monotype belongs here too: it is printed from a painted plate, but only one good impression can be taken.

An original print is one of a set of impressions pulled from a matrix — a woodblock, copper plate, litho stone or screen — made by the artist, or under the artist's direct supervision, for the purpose of printing. Every impression in the edition is an original work, because print was the intended form. A Rembrandt etching and a Chittaprosad linocut are original prints (see Stage 10).

A reproduction is a mechanical or digital copy of a work that already existed in another form: an offset poster of a painting, an inkjet copy of a watercolour, a photograph printed on canvas. It may be beautiful, signed and numbered, but it is a picture of a picture.

Where the words blur

"Limited edition print" describes original prints and reproductions alike, and sellers of reproductions rely on the confusion. "Lithograph" is correct both for a print drawn by hand on stone and for a poster run off by commercial offset lithography. A giclée is an inkjet print, the French-sounding name coined in the early 1990s to set fine-art inkjet printing apart from the office printer. With pigment inks on cotton paper it can be excellent and long-lasting, but a giclée of a painting is a reproduction however it is marketed. Some artists now make work digitally and intend the inkjet print as the finished object; then the print is the original, and an honest seller says so. Hand-embellished reproductions, with a few brushstrokes added over the print, are still reproductions.

Stage 10How Prints Are Made

Every printmaking method belongs to one of four families, defined by where the ink sits on the matrix. Know the family and most prints can be identified with a magnifier and a lamp held low to one side.

Relief

In a relief print the artist cuts away everything that should stay white and inks the raised surface that remains. A woodcut is cut along the grain of a plank, which often shows in flat areas; a linocut is cut in grainless linoleum; a wood engraving is cut with fine tools into the hard end grain of boxwood. Look for ink slightly heavier at the edges of shapes and faint embossing on the back of the sheet. Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints are the most collected relief prints in the world; in India, the popular relief prints of the Battala presses of nineteenth-century Calcutta and the linocuts of Chittaprosad are both worth seeking out.

Intaglio

In intaglio the image lies below the surface of a metal plate. The plate is inked, wiped so that ink stays only in the grooves, and printed onto damp paper under heavy pressure. That pressure leaves a plate mark, a bevelled dent just outside the image, and the printed lines stand very slightly proud of the paper.

• Engraving: lines cut into copper with a steel burin; crisp lines that swell and taper.
• Etching: lines drawn through an acid-resistant coating and bitten by acid; freer and blunt-ended. Rembrandt was its great master.
• Drypoint: lines scratched with a needle, raising a burr that prints a soft, velvety line and wears quickly, so good editions are small.
• Aquatint: resin dust fused to the plate gives areas of tone that look like a fine net under a magnifier. Thomas and William Daniell's Oriental Scenery views of India (1795–1808) are aquatints coloured by hand.
• Mezzotint: a plate roughened all over, then burnished smooth where it should print light, giving deep, velvety blacks.

Planographic

Lithography, invented by Alois Senefelder in Bavaria in the 1790s, prints from a flat surface. The artist draws with greasy crayon or ink on stone or a prepared plate; the surface is dampened, water clings to the bare areas, and the greasy ink clings only to the drawing. There is no plate mark. Look for the grain of the stone in crayon areas and ink lying flat. Commercial offset lithography works on the same principle but prints the image as a pattern of regular dots.

Stencil

A screenprint, or serigraph, is made by forcing ink through fine mesh on a frame, with a stencil blocking the areas that stay clear. The colour lies in flat, even, slightly raised layers with crisp edges, sometimes with the mesh pattern visible at the edges under a magnifier.

Stage 11Signatures, Edition Numbers, Provenance and Certificates

Signatures

A signature is evidence, not proof. It is the easiest part of a work to copy, and adding a famous name to an unsigned or lesser picture is the oldest trick in the trade. Equally, an unsigned work is not necessarily wrong: most Indian court paintings were never signed, and many modern artists left studies unsigned.

On a painting, look at how the signature sits in the paint. One painted into the wet surface, or lying under the varnish, belongs with the picture; one sitting on top of old varnish, or in fresher-looking paint, needs explaining. On a print, the convention (not a rule) is a pencil signature below the image at the right and the edition number at the left. A signature printed as part of the image is signed in the plate, not signed by hand, and a pencil signature on a reproduction makes it a signed reproduction, nothing more.

Edition numbers and proofs

23/75 means impression 23 of an edition of 75. It rarely records the order of printing, and a low number is not better. What matters is the total: every numbered impression, every proof, and every other edition of the same image. Beware of the same picture issued on paper and on canvas, in two sizes, or in several separately numbered editions, which can turn an "edition of 250" into a thousand. A restrike, printed from the original matrix after the edition, often after the artist's death, is worth far less. Reputable publishers supply a documentation sheet giving the edition size, proofs, paper, printer and date, and cancel the plate after printing.

Provenance

Provenance is the documented history of a work's ownership, and it can matter as much as the signature. Good provenance is a chain of paper: the artist's or gallery's invoice, gallery and exhibition labels on the back, auction catalogues, letters, photographs of the work in a studio or home, and entries in books about the artist. A catalogue raisonné, the complete scholarly listing of one artist's work, is the strongest reference of all; few Indian artists have one, which makes other documents count for more.

Gaps are normal; families do not keep receipts for a century. Invented history is not. A provenance that is all story and no paper — "from an old family who wish to remain anonymous" — is a warning, and forgers fake labels and photographs too. Never remove old labels, stamps or inscriptions from a work. Photograph them.

Certificates

A certificate is worth exactly the authority of whoever signed it. One signed by a living artist, with a photograph of the work, is useful; for a dead artist, the opinion of a recognised specialist, estate or foundation carries weight. A certificate printed by the seller is only the seller's promise. What protects you most is an invoice that describes the work specifically — artist, title, date, medium, size, and whether it is unique, a print or a reproduction — because that is the statement you can hold a seller to.

Stage 12Where to Buy: Studios, Galleries, Fairs and Auctions

From the artist

Buying from the studio gives you the artist's own account of the work and often a lower price than a gallery. Final-year shows at art colleges are the cheapest way into original work by artists starting out; in India the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai, the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Kala Bhavana at Santiniketan and the College of Art in New Delhi are among the long-established schools worth visiting. Ask for a full invoice (see Stage 11) and pay by a traceable method. If the artist has a gallery, expect the studio price to match the gallery's. For a commission, agree in writing on size, medium, subject, price, deposit, sketches and what happens if you do not like the result.

Galleries

A primary gallery represents living artists, sets their prices, exhibits them and takes a commission on sales, often around half. A secondary dealer resells work that has been owned before. A good primary gallery gives consistent prices, a proper invoice and a long view of an artist's career, and its openings are free. Ask for the price list and what similar works have sold for; some galleries accept payment in instalments.

Fairs and festivals

Art fairs gather many galleries in one place for a few days, which is ideal for looking and comparing prices; India Art Fair, held each year in New Delhi, is the country's best known. For folk and tribal painting, crafts fairs and state emporia bring you close to the painters (see Stage 21).

Auctions

An auction house sells on behalf of owners. Each lot has an estimate, and the owner may set a confidential minimum, the reserve. The winning bid is the hammer price; on top of it the buyer pays a buyer's premium, a percentage set out in the house's conditions of sale, plus taxes. Work out the full cost before you bid. Read the conditions of sale for what the house guarantees about authenticity and for how long, always ask for a condition report, and see the work at the preview if you can: online bidding makes it easy to buy something you have seen only as a well-lit photograph. In India, Saffronart, AstaGuru and Pundole's hold regular sales of Indian art, and the major international auction houses hold sales of modern and contemporary South Asian art.

Stage 13Fakes, and a Fair Price for a New Buyer

Where the fakes are

Forgers go where the money is and checking is hard. In India that means, above all, the celebrated modernists (see Stage 20), whose prices have risen fastest and many of whose works were never documented; old miniature paintings, where modern copies are aged artificially or painted on old paper; folk paintings sold under famous names; and prints, where reproductions are passed off as originals with a pencil signature added.

Warning signs

• A famous name at a fraction of what that artist's work fetches elsewhere.
• Pressure to decide quickly, or a reason why the work cannot be examined properly or shown to anyone else.
• A story instead of documents: an anonymous old family, a foreign estate, a gift from the artist to a friend now dead.
• A certificate from the seller, or from someone whose authority you cannot confirm.
• No written description, and no refund if the work proves not to be what was claimed.
• Many works by the same famous artist at a small, unknown dealer.
• Materials that do not fit the story, such as bright modern board behind a supposedly old work.

Buy from sellers with a reputation to lose, and before any major purchase get a second opinion from someone with no stake in the sale. Compare the work with documented examples in museums, books and past auction catalogues. For expensive works, scientific analysis can rule out an impossible date, such as a pigment that did not exist when the work was supposedly painted, though it cannot prove who held the brush.

A fair price

There is no single fair price for a work of art, but there is a fair range, and a few factors set it.

For a first collection, the best value is almost always in works on paper and original prints by living artists, bought from the artist or a primary gallery. Be sceptical of promised investment returns: once commissions, premiums and taxes are counted, most art resells for less than it cost, and much of it does not resell at all. Buy what you would be glad to live with if it turned out to be worth nothing, and spend what you save on proper framing (see Stage 14).

Storage and Preservation

Stage 14Storing and Framing: Your Own Work and What You Buy

Paintings rarely die in one event. They fade a little every sunny afternoon, swell with every monsoon, lose a flake at every careless move and are eaten from the back where nobody looks. This band covers the work you make and the work you buy alike, because a canvas off your own easel and one from a gallery need the same care.

Drying and varnishing your own work

Watercolour and gouache feel dry in minutes but hold moisture in the paper for hours, longer in the monsoon: leave them flat overnight before stacking, and never stack gouache face to face. Acrylic is touch-dry quickly but keeps curing for days and softens in heat, so give it at least a few days before anything touches the surface, and never leave a fresh painting face down or wrapped in a hot room or car. Oil can stay soft under a dry skin for months. Keep new oils face out and uncovered, in moving air and some daylight, since linseed yellows in the dark, and do not stack, wrap or glaze them until they are hard.

A varnish evens out the gloss, deepens the darks and takes the dirt and scuffs that would otherwise land on the paint. Choose a removable one, which a conservator can take off decades later without touching the paint beneath; that is the real reason to varnish.

• Oil paintings traditionally wait six months to a year for the final varnish, longer for thick paint; a thin retouch varnish protects them in the meantime.
• Acrylic paintings usually get an isolation coat of clear gloss medium or soft gel first, then a removable varnish, so that later cleaning takes off only the varnish.
• Dammar, a natural resin, yellows and turns brittle with age; modern synthetic picture varnishes sold as removable and non-yellowing are the better choice.
• Never varnish in humid weather, or trapped moisture leaves a milky haze called bloom. In most of India, avoid the monsoon and pick a dry winter day.
• Never varnish watercolour, gouache, pastel or any work on paper; a mount and glazing protect them instead.
• Write the date and the varnish used on the back of the canvas. A future conservator will thank you.

Storing paintings on canvas and panel

• Upright, never flat in a pile, since weight stretches canvas and dents paint.
• Face to face and back to back, with a sheet of acid-free board or rigid polypropylene between each pair, a little larger than the paintings, so that no corner or stretcher bar can press into a canvas.
• Off the floor and away from outside walls: on battens or a slatted rack at least 10–15 cm up, clear of floods, wet mopping and termites, against an interior wall.
• Loosely covered with a clean cotton sheet. Plastic sheeting wrapped tight traps moisture and breeds mould in an Indian home.
• No bubble wrap against the paint. Pressed on a surface, especially in heat, it prints a pattern of circles. For moving, wrap in glassine or smooth polythene first with the bubbles facing out, and unwrap on arrival.
• Rolling is a last resort, for unstretched canvas only: paint facing outwards, around a tube at least 15 cm across, interleaved with silicone release paper, stored horizontally and supported at its ends. Never roll thick, cracked or old paint.

Storing works on paper

Keep works on paper flat, in acid-free folders or window mounts, in a plan chest (a cabinet of wide, shallow drawers) or an archival clamshell box, interleaved with acid-free tissue. Do not overfill a drawer: a sheet dragged out from under twenty others gets creased. Gouache, pastel and charcoal must have nothing sliding across them, so give them window mounts that hold the covering sheet clear, and never put them in plastic sleeves, whose static lifts the pigment. Powder-coated steel plan chests are the best choice in India; wood gives off acids and feeds termites, so line any wooden drawer with acid-free board and have the furniture treated. Store sketchbooks upright, like books.

Framing for conservation

A good frame is a small protective case. A bad one slowly poisons what it holds.

• Mount board. Use museum board, made of cotton and free of lignin, the part of wood fibre that makes paper yellow, or a conservation board of purified wood pulp. Ordinary mount board turns acid and burns a brown line into the paper along its bevelled edge.
• Hinges, not tape. Attach works on paper with small hinges of Japanese tissue and wheat-starch paste, which a conservator can release with a little moisture. Never use masking tape, clear tape or glue, and never heat-bond (dry-mount) anything of value.
• Glazing. Use UV-filtering glass or acrylic sheet, remembering that it blocks most ultraviolet but not the visible light that also fades. Acrylic is light and shatterproof but holds static, so pastel, charcoal and powdery gouache always go under glass.
• Nothing touches the glazing. Gouache, pastel, paint or paper pressed against glass can stick to it, leave a ghost image on it and grow mould where condensation gathers. The mount, or hidden spacers, must keep an air gap.
• Backing. Behind the work goes acid-free board, then a rigid backing of acid-free foam board or fluted polypropylene, never hardboard, plywood, MDF or cardboard. Seal the back of the frame with paper tape against dust and insects.
• Canvases benefit from a backing board fixed to the back of the stretcher. It stops knocks and fingers pushing into the canvas, keeps out dust and insects and slows changes in humidity.
• Hanging. Use D-rings with braided wire or two separate hooks, never one nail and string, and stick cork or felt bumpers on the lower back corners so that air moves behind the frame.

Stage 15Preservation: The Enemies, One by One

Light

Light damage adds up and cannot be undone. Ultraviolet does the most harm, but visible light fades colour too, so UV-filtering glazing slows the damage rather than stopping it. The speed depends on the materials: a watercolour in fugitive or dye-based colours can lose its pinks and yellows in one sunny year, while an oil painting in earth colours barely changes in a lifetime. This is where the lightfastness ratings of Stage 2 come home. Works on paper — watercolours, drawings, prints, gouaches and inkjet reproductions — are the most vulnerable, and the paper itself yellows and weakens as well.

Museums typically light watercolours and drawings to about 50 lux and oil paintings to about 150–200 lux; daylight near a window runs to thousands. At home, never hang a work where direct sun reaches it, even for an hour a day, and remember that the patch of sunlight moves with the seasons. Hang works on paper away from windows and rest them in a drawer for part of each year. Use LED lighting, which gives off almost no ultraviolet and little heat, and draw the curtains in rooms that are not in use.

Humidity and temperature

Relative humidity (RH) is the water vapour in the air as a percentage of the most the air could hold at that temperature. Canvas, wood, paper, glue and gum arabic are hygroscopic: they absorb moisture from damp air and give it up to dry air, swelling and shrinking as they do, while the paint on top cannot move as far. Every large swing strains the bond between them. Warm air holds more moisture, so heating a closed room lowers its RH and cooling it raises it.

Too damp, above about 65–70 per cent for days on end, and mould grows, paper cockles, glue softens, fittings rust and insects thrive. Too dry, and panels split, glue and gum turn brittle and loose paint lifts. Swings do more harm than a steady level that is a little too high or low: a painting that has spent decades at a steady, humid level can be damaged by being "rescued" overnight into a cold, dry, air-conditioned room.

These are ranges, not magic numbers. Stability matters more than the exact figure: a collection that has settled at a steady 60 per cent is safer there than moved abruptly to 45.

Damage you will see

Canvas slackness. Canvas and its glue size respond to every change in humidity, so a painting that is taut in April may sag in August and tighten again in winter. Seasonal sagging is a climate symptom, not a reason to reach for the keys. Over-tightening a valuable painting cracks its paint, and a loose key that drops behind the canvas pushes out a bulge. Steady the room first, and ask a conservator if the slackness stays.

Cracking and flaking. A fine network of cracks, called craquelure, is normal in older oil paintings and usually stable. Worry about cracks with raised, curling edges, paint lifting like a tent, new bare patches, or flakes on the lower lip of the frame. Spiral or ring-shaped cracks often mean something once struck or pressed against the canvas. If paint is flaking, lay the painting flat and face up, do not touch or cover the surface, keep any fallen flakes in a labelled envelope noting where they fell, and call a conservator.

Foxing and mould on paper. Foxing is a scatter of small reddish-brown spots. Its causes are still debated, with fungal activity and traces of iron in the paper both implicated, but damp always makes it worse. Mould is fuzzy or powdery, white, grey, green or black, often with a musty smell, and it stains and weakens paper for good. Its spores are a health hazard: isolate the work in a sealed bag or a separate dry room, wear a disposable FFP2 or N95 mask and gloves if you must handle it, do not brush it off indoors, and leave treatment to a conservator.

Fungus on canvas. In the monsoon, mould grows on glue size, on the backs of canvases, on stretchers and in the surface of unvarnished paintings, so check the back of every painting each season. A white haze on the front may be varnish bloom rather than mould; mould tends to form spots and threads that spread. Either way, move the painting to a drier room with moving air, do not wipe it with a damp cloth, and ask a conservator.

Insects

Silverfish graze paper for its size, paste and glue, leaving thin, irregular scraped patches. Cockroaches eat and soil paper. Termites hollow out stretchers, frames, backing boards and furniture from the inside and travel up walls in mud tubes; in many Indian homes they are the gravest threat of all. Booklice, tiny pale insects, feed on mould, so seeing them means the air is too damp. Wood-boring beetles leave small round holes and little heaps of powder beneath a frame.

Keep food out of rooms where work is stored, and keep storage clean, dry and regularly inspected. Never spray insecticide on or near a work, and do not put naphthalene balls in frames, folders or drawers: they are a health hazard and no substitute for clean, dry storage. Before the building is treated for termites or other pests, move the works out, and let the room air before they return. A work with live insects in it goes into a sealed polythene bag and to a conservator.

Where in the house

Outside walls are colder and damper than interior ones, and in the monsoon condensation can form behind a frame; use interior walls, or bumpers and a seasonal check. Kitchens coat pictures in grease and soot, and bathrooms swing from dry to saturated every day, so keep anything of value out of both. Smoke from diyas, incense, candles and mosquito coils darkens pictures over the years; keep good work away from the puja corner. Avoid walls beside air-conditioner outlets, coolers and heaters, and never store work in a basement, garage or loft, under a ground-floor bed where floods reach, or in a cupboard against an outside wall.

Stage 16Care in an Indian Climate: Handling, Records, Disasters and a Routine

The Indian climate

Most conservation advice was written for temperate Europe and North America. India asks more of a collection.

• Coastal cities — Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and the Konkan and Kerala coasts — combine high humidity for much of the year with salt air that corrodes hanging wire and hooks. Monsoon humidity often stays above 80 per cent for weeks, and Chennai's heaviest rain comes with the north-east monsoon, from October to December.
• The northern plains swing from dry summer heat well above 40°C to the sudden damp of the monsoon, and on to cold, foggy winter nights.
• Dust storms before the monsoon drive fine grit into frames and folders; keep windows shut and frame backs sealed.
• Power cuts stop dehumidifiers and air-conditioners, and humidity climbs within hours. Passive defences keep working when the power does not: sealed frame backs, closed boxes and cabinets with silica gel, and storage in an interior room.

Air-conditioning dries the air while it runs, but a room chilled by day and shut up hot at night swings every twenty-four hours; a steady, moderate setting is kinder than cold bursts. For a serious collection, a dehumidifier running in a closed storage room through the monsoon is the most effective single purchase.

Handling and transport

• Hands. Clean, dry hands are usually best for paper, since cotton gloves reduce your grip and snag edges; wear nitrile gloves for glazing, gilded frames and photographs. Never touch a paint surface.
• Paper travels on a rigid board or in a folder, never held by one corner.
• Paintings. Carry one at a time, one hand under the frame and one at the side, never by the top rail or the stretcher's crossbar, and keep your fingers off the back of the canvas. Large works need two people and a cleared route.
• Cars. Stand paintings upright, wedged and separated by board. A parked car in an Indian summer gets hot enough to soften acrylic and varnish, so never leave work in one.
• Packing. Wrap in glassine or smooth polythene, then bubble wrap with the bubbles outward; add corner protectors and a rigid board or crate, and criss-cross any glass with low-tack tape so that a break cannot shred the work. Use a specialist fine-art shipper for anything valuable.
• Arrival. After a move between very different climates, leave the package closed for a day so that the work adjusts slowly and condensation does not form on it.

Cleaning, and when to call a conservator

Owners do more harm by cleaning than by neglect, so do not attempt to clean or repair a valuable work yourself. Never use water, household cleaners, bread, potato or any other home remedy on a painting or a work on paper; never try to remove varnish; and never spray glass cleaner at a frame, because it seeps under the glazing — spray the cloth instead. Dust frames with a soft brush. A sound, varnished oil painting may be dusted very gently with a soft, clean brush; flaking paint, pastel, gouache and unvarnished surfaces should not be touched at all.

Call a conservator for flaking, tears, holes or dents; mould, foxing, stains or water damage; insects; yellowed varnish; slackness with cracking; failing old repairs; and before re-framing anything valuable. A good conservator gives a written condition report and estimate, photographs the work before and after, and uses materials that can be reversed later. In India, INTACH, the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, runs conservation centres in several cities; the National Research Laboratory for Conservation of Cultural Property in Lucknow is the government's specialist laboratory; and museum conservation departments can often recommend private conservators. Ask about training, and ask to see a past treatment report.

Records and insurance

For every work, record the artist, title, date, medium, size in centimetres (height before width), signature and inscriptions, edition number, date and place of purchase, price, provenance, exhibitions and condition, and keep the invoice and any certificate with the record. Photograph the front, the back, the signature, the labels and any damage. Painters should keep the same record for their own work, adding the pigments, surface and varnish. Keep the catalogue digitally with a 3-2-1 backup: three copies, on two kinds of storage, one of them away from home.

Many home insurance policies limit or exclude works of art unless each is declared, so read yours and, for a valuable collection, ask about specialist fine-art cover. Update valuations every few years, and never post photographs of valuable works with their value or location.

Disasters

Decide in advance what to save first, and remember that people come first. Keep work away from water tanks, bathrooms, leaking roofs, solvents and oily rags, and fit a smoke alarm. The floods in Mumbai in 2005, Chennai in 2015 and Kerala in 2018 showed how fast water reaches ground floors.

If works get wet, act at once. Take works on paper out of their frames unless the paper has stuck to the glass, and dry them flat on clean blotting paper or towels in moving air, never with heat or in the sun. Mould can start within two days, so if you cannot dry them in time, seal them in polythene bags and freeze them until a conservator can help. Keep wet paintings flat and face up, do not blot the paint, and call a conservator.

A routine

Stage 17Miniatures: The Mughal and Deccani Studios

Painting in India is far older than the easel. The Buddhist cave murals at Ajanta in Maharashtra, the best known painted around the fifth century CE, already show a mastery of line and crowded narrative. Illustrated manuscripts followed: Buddhist texts on palm leaf in eastern India, and Jain manuscripts in western India, on palm leaf and later on paper.

"Miniature" is an English label. These paintings were made as manuscript pages and album leaves, to be held in the hand and looked at closely, and most are smaller than a sheet of office paper. The support was usually wasli, several sheets of paper pasted into a stiff card. The artist drew the design, laid a thin white priming and built the image in opaque, gum-bound colour (see Stage 3), burnishing it with a smooth stone between layers. The palette included ultramarine from lapis lazuli, malachite, orpiment, vermilion, lead white, carbon black, and gold and silver as leaf or powder.

The Mughal workshop

When the emperor Humayun returned to India in 1555 after years of exile, he brought painters from the Persian court, among them Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad. Under his son Akbar they led a large imperial workshop in which Persian refinement met the energy and observation of Indian painters. Its first great project, the Hamzanama, an illustrated romance, ran to some fourteen hundred large paintings on cloth over about fifteen years, of which only a fraction survives. Work was often shared, one artist designing a composition and another colouring it, and many pages record more than one name. Basawan and Daswanth were among the most admired of Akbar's painters.

Jahangir preferred single images for albums and prized individual genius: portraits, court scenes and natural-history studies of startling precision by painters such as Ustad Mansur, famous for his birds and animals, Abu'l Hasan and the portraitist Bishandas. Under Shah Jahan painting grew formal and jewel-like, as in the illustrated history of his reign, the Padshahnama, now in the Royal Collection in Britain. Imperial patronage is usually said to have waned under Aurangzeb, and painters moved to regional courts, carrying Mughal technique into Rajasthan and the hills.

The Deccan

The sultanates of the Deccan — Bijapur, Golconda and Ahmadnagar — developed their own painting in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: lyrical, rich in gold and unusual colour, with dreamlike landscapes and close links to Persian and Turkish art. Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur, himself a poet and musician, was among its greatest patrons.

Stage 18Rajput and Pahari Painting

Mughal painting looked to the court and the natural world. The painting of the Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan and the hill states of the western Himalaya was steeped instead in poetry, music and devotion to Krishna. Made for Hindu rulers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, it absorbed Mughal technique and turned it to its own ends.

Rajasthan

Each court had its own manner. Mewar, centred on Udaipur, painted bold, flat, brilliantly coloured narratives and, later, large scenes of court life and festivals. Bundi and Kota are known for lush vegetation and, at Kota, dramatic hunts in dense jungle. Kishangarh produced the most refined and stylised faces of all. Bikaner stayed close to Mughal refinement, while Marwar (Jodhpur), Amber and later Jaipur developed vigorous court styles of their own. At Nathdwara, the temple of Shrinathji gave rise to the pichhwai, a large painted cloth hung behind the image of the deity, a tradition still practised.

The favourite subjects were the life of Krishna and his love for Radha; Jayadeva's poem the Gita Govinda; the Rasikapriya, a poetic catalogue of lovers and their moods; the Barahmasa, the twelve months; and the ragamala, a "garland" of musical modes, each shown as a scene with its own mood, hour and season.

The hills

Pahari painting, "of the hills", flourished in small states in what are now Himachal Pradesh and Jammu. Basohli, in the late seventeenth century, used fierce, hot colour and set fragments of iridescent beetle wing into the paint to imitate emeralds. In the eighteenth century a gentler, more naturalistic manner grew up, associated above all with one family from Guler: the painter Pandit Seu and his sons Manaku and Nainsukh. Nainsukh, working for Raja Balwant Singh of Jasrota, recorded his patron's daily life with a wit and intimacy unlike anything else in Indian painting. Later generations of the family worked for many hill courts, and at Kangra, under Raja Sansar Chand in the late eighteenth century, the style reached its most lyrical form: cool greens, delicate lines, lovers in moonlit groves. The art historian B. N. Goswamy argued that Pahari painting is better understood through such families, who moved between courts, than through the states that employed them.

Paintings were made in sets — a Bhagavata Purana or a ragamala might run to dozens or hundreds of leaves — and in the twentieth century many sets were broken up and sold page by page, so one set may now be scattered across a dozen collections. Every old leaf is an antiquity (see Stage 22), and the warning about modern copies in Stage 17 applies here too.

Stage 19Company Painting and Raja Ravi Varma

Painting for the Company

From the mid-eighteenth century, as East India Company officials settled in India, painters trained in Mughal and regional traditions found new patrons, and their work for them is called Company painting. The British wanted records — plants, birds and animals, the dress and trades of different communities, festivals and monuments — and the painters obliged, working in watercolour on European paper and borrowing perspective and shading while keeping the precision of their own training. Centres included Murshidabad, Patna, Lucknow, Delhi, Calcutta, Benares, Thanjavur and Tiruchirappalli. Among the finest works are the natural-history paintings made in Calcutta in the 1770s and early 1780s for Sir Elijah and Lady Impey by painters from Patna led by Shaikh Zain al-Din. Cheaper sets painted on thin sheets of mica were sold as souvenirs.

European artists came too. Thomas and William Daniell toured India for years and published their views as hand-coloured aquatints (see Stage 10); original Daniell aquatints and their many later reproductions are a classic test of a print collector's eye. Art schools on the British model followed in Madras, Calcutta and Bombay in the 1850s, teaching European academic drawing and oil painting.

Raja Ravi Varma

Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906), born at Kilimanoor in Travancore, became the most celebrated Indian painter of his age by putting European oil painting to Indian subjects. Largely self-taught in oils, he painted portraits for princely patrons and, most influentially, scenes from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas — Shakuntala, Damayanti, Lakshmi, Saraswati — with the modelling and theatrical staging of Victorian academic art, and with women in draped saris who came to define an ideal of beauty.

In 1894 he set up a lithographic press in Bombay, later moved to Malavli near Lonavala, to print his paintings as oleographs: colour lithographs varnished and sometimes textured to resemble oil paintings. They carried images of the gods into homes across India and shaped a century of calendar art. The press was later sold to its German technician, Fritz Schleicher, and went on printing Ravi Varma's images long after his death. His paintings are declared national art treasures (see Stage 22), and large collections of his oils hang in the Sree Chitra Art Gallery in Thiruvananthapuram and the Maharaja Fateh Singh Museum in Vadodara.

Stage 20The Bengal School and the Progressive Artists' Group

The Bengal School

By 1900 some Indian artists and critics had come to see academic oil painting as a colonial import. In Calcutta, Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951), of the same Jorasanko Tagore family as Rabindranath, turned for inspiration to Mughal and Rajput painting and the Ajanta murals, encouraged by E. B. Havell, principal of the Government School of Art. Japanese painters who visited Calcutta in the early 1900s shared the wash technique that became the movement's hallmark: thin watercolour laid on and repeatedly washed back to a soft, misty glow. Abanindranath's Bharat Mata (1905), a saffron-robed woman personifying the nation, became an emblem of the Swadeshi movement, and the Indian Society of Oriental Art, founded in 1907, promoted the new painting.

His most important pupil, Nandalal Bose (1882–1966), led Kala Bhavana, the art school of Rabindranath Tagore's university at Santiniketan, from the 1920s. At Gandhi's request he painted a series of posters for the Congress session at Haripura in 1938, and he and his students illustrated the original manuscript of the Constitution of India. Santiniketan grew into a different kind of school, open-air and rooted in craft and village life, and later home to Benode Behari Mukherjee and the sculptor Ramkinkar Baij.

Two painters stood apart. Jamini Roy (1887–1972) left his academic training behind for bold outlines and flat colour drawn from Bengal's folk traditions, including Kalighat painting (see Stage 21), and priced his work so that ordinary people could buy it. Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941), born in Budapest and trained in Paris, returned to India in 1934 and painted Indian life with a modern European training and an unsentimental eye, before dying in Lahore at twenty-eight. Both, like Rabindranath, Abanindranath and his brother Gaganendranath, are among the nine artists whose work is a declared national art treasure.

The Progressive Artists' Group

In Bombay in 1947, the year of Independence, six young painters founded the Progressive Artists' Group: F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza, M. F. Husain, K. H. Ara, H. A. Gade and S. K. Bakre. They rejected both academic realism and what they saw as the Bengal School's nostalgia, and looked to European modernism to make an art for a new nation. The group itself was short-lived — Souza left for London in 1949 and Raza for Paris in 1950 — but its members and associates, among them V. S. Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padamsee, Krishen Khanna and Ram Kumar, became the core of Indian modernism and remain the most sought-after names in the market, and the most faked (see Stage 13).

Other centres grew alongside: the Calcutta Group, formed in 1943; the Faculty of Fine Arts at Baroda, founded in 1950 and later a centre for artists such as K. G. Subramanyan, Gulammohammed Sheikh and Bhupen Khakhar; and the Cholamandal Artists' Village near Madras, founded in 1966. Institutions followed: the Jehangir Art Gallery opened in Bombay in 1952, and the Lalit Kala Akademi and the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi both date from 1954.

Stage 21Folk and Tribal Painting

India has always had painting made by communities for their own walls, floors, festivals and rituals, and by hereditary painters who told stories for a living. Every label for it — folk, tribal, Adivasi, traditional — is imperfect. What matters to a buyer is that these are living traditions with named artists, and that most of them moved onto paper and canvas only in the twentieth century.

Madhubani, or Mithila painting, comes from northern Bihar, where women painted the walls of the home for weddings and festivals, above all the kohbar, the room of the newly married couple, crowded with gods, fish, lotuses, bamboo, sun and moon. After the Bihar earthquake of 1934 the British official W. G. Archer saw and photographed paintings on exposed walls, and during a severe drought in the late 1960s a government handicrafts programme encouraged the women to paint on paper for sale. Jagdamba Devi, Sita Devi, Ganga Devi and Baua Devi became nationally known.

The Warli of the northern Konkan, in the Thane and Palghar districts of Maharashtra, paint in white rice paste on mud walls, building scenes of farming, hunting, marriage and the circling tarpa dance from circles, triangles and lines; Jivya Soma Mashe took the tradition onto paper and canvas and into international exhibitions. The Pardhan Gond painters of Madhya Pradesh, following Jangarh Singh Shyam, fill bold outlines of animals, trees and spirits with dots, dashes and fine lines; Bhajju Shyam and Durga Bai Vyam are among those whose work has illustrated celebrated books.

In Odisha, pattachitra is painted on cloth stiffened with a paste of tamarind seed and chalk, above all in the village of Raghurajpur near Puri, with stories of Jagannath and Krishna framed in dense borders. In West Bengal the patuas of villages such as Naya in Paschim Medinipur paint long vertical scrolls and unroll them frame by frame while singing the story, whether an epic or a recent flood. In nineteenth-century Calcutta, patuas near the Kalighat temple created Kalighat painting: quick, sweeping images on cheap mill-made paper of gods and goddesses and of the city's fashionable babus, courtesans and scandals, sold to pilgrims until cheap printed pictures took their market. Original nineteenth-century Kalighat paintings are now museum pieces and antiquities.

Many more traditions reward exploring, among them the phad scrolls of Rajasthan, Cheriyal scrolls from Telangana, Thanjavur painting with gold foil and raised gesso, Kerala murals, Pithora painting in Gujarat, Saura painting in Odisha, and Sohrai and Khovar from Jharkhand.

Stage 22The Market Today, and the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act

The market

India's art market is concentrated in Mumbai and New Delhi, with active scenes in Kolkata, Bengaluru and other cities. Galleries representing living artists make up the primary market; auctions and dealers reselling work make up the secondary market. The market boomed in the mid-2000s, fell sharply in the global financial crisis of 2008 and recovered over the following decade. In recent years the leading modernists have fetched tens of crores of rupees at auction, while most Indian artists have no auction record at all. Private patronage has built museums such as the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi and the Museum of Art & Photography in Bengaluru, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has become a major showcase for contemporary art. For the new buyer, two realities hold: most art is hard to resell, and the prices of a few famous names say nothing about the rest.

Two legal points. Indian income-tax law treats paintings, drawings and sculptures as capital assets rather than personal effects, so a profit on selling one may be taxable; take current professional advice. And buying a painting does not buy its copyright, which stays with the artist or the artist's heirs unless assigned in writing: you may display and sell your painting, but not reproduce it as prints or products without permission.

The Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972

Anyone who owns, buys, inherits or hopes to take abroad older Indian painting needs to know this law, which is administered by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) together with the Antiquities and Art Treasures Rules, 1973.

• Antiquity. Among other things, any painting, sculpture or other work of art that has existed for at least one hundred years; for manuscripts and certain other documents of historical, literary or aesthetic value, the threshold is seventy-five years. Almost every genuine Mughal, Deccani, Rajput, Pahari and Company painting, and every nineteenth-century Kalighat painting, is an antiquity.
• Art treasure. A work that is not an antiquity but that the central government has declared an art treasure for its artistic and aesthetic value, which the Act permits only after the artist's death. The works of nine artists have been so declared: Raja Ravi Varma, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy, Amrita Sher-Gil, Nicholas Roerich and Sailoz Mookherjea.
• Export. Only the central government, or an agency it authorises, may export an antiquity or an art treasure. A private owner cannot lawfully take one out of India, whether to sell it, give it away or hang it in a new home abroad. Doing so is a criminal offence punishable with imprisonment, and the work can be confiscated.
• Registration. Antiquities in the categories notified under the Act, which include paintings, must be registered with the ASI's registering officers, who issue a certificate with a photograph, and transfers of registered antiquities must be reported. Register an inherited or purchased antiquity promptly, and ask for the certificate when you buy.
• Dealing. Selling antiquities as a business requires a licence.
• Non-antiquity certificates. A new work that looks old, such as a contemporary miniature, can still be stopped at customs. The ASI examines such objects and can certify that they are not antiquities; arrange this before you travel.

Replacing the 1972 Act has been discussed for years, so check the current position with the ASI or a lawyer before any purchase, sale or move abroad. India is also a party to the 1970 UNESCO Convention against the illicit trade in cultural property, and stolen Indian antiquities have been returned from collections abroad in case after case. A work that looks old and important but comes with no history should be treated as a question, not a bargain.

Glossary

A

Acid-free — made without the acidity that turns paper and board brown and brittle. [Stage 5]

Antiquity — under Indian law, among other things any work of art at least a hundred years old. [Stage 22]

Art treasure — under Indian law, a work that is not an antiquity but has been declared an art treasure after the artist's death; it cannot be exported privately. [Stage 22]

Artist's proof (A.P.) — an impression outside the numbered edition, traditionally kept by the artist. [Stage 11]

B

Binder — the substance that holds pigment together and fixes it to the surface. [Stage 1]

Bloom — in watercolour, a ragged edge where wet paint runs into a drying wash; in varnish, a milky haze caused by moisture. [Stages 3, 14]

Blue Wool Scale — a lightfastness scale from 1 (fades fast) to 8 (most resistant). [Stage 2]

Buffered — containing an alkaline reserve that neutralises acid. [Stage 14]

Buyer's premium — the percentage an auction house adds to the winning bid. [Stage 12]

C

Catalogue raisonné — the complete scholarly listing of one artist's work. [Stage 11]

Chroma — a colour's intensity, from grey to fully saturated. [Stage 6]

Colour Index Generic Name — the standard pigment code on a paint label, such as PB29 for ultramarine. [Stage 2]

Company painting — work by Indian painters for East India Company patrons. [Stage 19]

Craquelure — the network of fine cracks in an aged paint layer. [Stage 15]

E

Edition — the set of impressions printed from one matrix. [Stage 9]

F

Fat over lean — the rule that each layer of oil paint should hold more oil than the one beneath. [Stage 4]

Foxing — small reddish-brown spots on paper, made worse by damp. [Stage 15]

G

Gesso — a chalk-and-glue ground for rigid panels; also the loose name for acrylic primer. [Stages 4, 5]

Giclée — a fine-art inkjet print. [Stage 9]

Glaze, glazing — in painting, a transparent layer over dry paint; in framing, the glass or acrylic sheet in front of a work. [Stages 3, 14]

Gouache — opaque watercolour. [Stage 3]

Ground — the layer between the support and the paint. [Stage 5]

H

Hue — a colour's name on the colour wheel; on a paint label, an imitation of a named pigment. [Stages 2, 6]

I

Intaglio — printing from lines or tones below the surface of a plate. [Stage 10]

Isolation coat — a clear layer that seals an acrylic painting under its varnish. [Stage 14]

K

Keys — small wedges in the corners of a stretcher, used to tighten canvas. [Stage 5]

L

Lightfastness — a colour's resistance to fading or darkening in light. [Stage 2]

Lithography — printing from a flat surface on which grease and water repel each other. [Stage 10]

M

Miniature — the English term for Indian manuscript and album paintings. [Stage 17]

N

Non-antiquity certificate — a certificate from the Archaeological Survey of India that an old-looking object is not an antiquity. [Stage 22]

O

Oleograph — a colour lithograph varnished to resemble an oil painting. [Stage 19]

P

Pigment — an insoluble coloured powder, the colour in paint. [Stage 2]

Plate mark — the indentation left in the paper by an intaglio plate. [Stage 10]

Provenance — the documented history of a work's ownership. [Stage 11]

R

Ragamala — a set of paintings showing musical modes as scenes, each with its own mood. [Stage 18]

Relative humidity (RH) — the water vapour in the air as a percentage of the most it could hold at that temperature. [Stage 15]

Relief print — a print from the raised surface of a block, such as a woodcut or linocut. [Stage 10]

Reproduction — a mechanical or digital copy of a work that already existed in another form. [Stage 9]

Restrike — an impression printed from the original matrix after the edition. [Stage 11]

S

Screenprint — a print made by forcing ink through mesh past a stencil; also called a serigraph. [Stage 10]

Silica gel — a moisture absorber that works only in a closed space. [Stage 16]

Stretcher — a wooden frame with adjustable corners over which canvas is stretched. [Stage 5]

V

Value — how light or dark a colour is. [Stage 6]

Varnish — a clear, ideally removable, protective top coat. [Stage 14]

W

Wash technique — the Bengal School's method of laying on thin watercolour and repeatedly washing it back. [Stage 20]

Wasli — sheets of paper pasted together into card, the support for Indian miniatures. [Stage 17]

Further Reading and Organisations

Making paintings

• Ralph Mayer, The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques
• Cennino Cennini, Il Libro dell'Arte, translated by Daniel V. Thompson as The Craftsman's Handbook
• Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color
• Victoria Finlay, Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox
• Josef Albers, Interaction of Color
• James Gurney, Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter
• David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art and Fear
• Monona Rossol, The Artist's Complete Health and Safety Guide

Prints, collecting and care

• Bamber Gascoigne, How to Identify Prints
• John Ross, Clare Romano and Tim Ross, The Complete Printmaker
• Garry Thomson, The Museum Environment
• Margaret Holben Ellis, The Care of Prints and Drawings
• Joyce Hill Stoner and Rebecca Rushfield, editors, Conservation of Easel Paintings

Indian painting

• B. N. Goswamy, The Spirit of Indian Painting: Close Encounters with 101 Great Works, 1100–1900
• B. N. Goswamy, Nainsukh of Guler
• Milo Cleveland Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting
• Mildred Archer, Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period
• William Dalrymple, editor, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company
• Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922, and The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947
• Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives
• Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India
• Jyotindra Jain, Kalighat Painting: Images from a Changing World
• Bhajju Shyam, Durga Bai and Ram Singh Urveti, The Night Life of Trees

Bodies and institutions

• Archaeological Survey of India: registration of antiquities and non-antiquity certificates
• INTACH, the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage: conservation centres
• National Research Laboratory for Conservation of Cultural Property, Lucknow
• Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi
• International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works
• Canadian Conservation Institute, for its published guidance on collection care

Where to see Indian painting

• National Museum, New Delhi, and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai: miniatures and much else
• Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad, and Bharat Kala Bhavan, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi: miniatures
• Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh, and Bhuri Singh Museum, Chamba: Pahari painting
• Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata: the colonial period, including the Daniells
• Sree Chitra Art Gallery, Thiruvananthapuram, and Maharaja Fateh Singh Museum, Vadodara: Raja Ravi Varma
• National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru: modern Indian art
• Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, and Museum of Art & Photography, Bengaluru: modern and contemporary art
• Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, and National Crafts Museum and Hastkala Academy, New Delhi: folk and tribal art

Image Sourcing Sheet