Which one of the following was not a feature of the art of painting in India in the 19th century?

Correct — D, The distinction between elite and popular art widened. The stem asks for the feature that was NOT part of nineteenth-century Indian painting, and this is it: the century moved the other way. Cheap woodcut prints from the Battala presses of north Calcutta, the Kalighat pats sold outside the temple, and later the mass-produced oleographs of Raja Ravi Varma put the same images into a wealthy drawing room and a weaver's home alike. Mechanical reproduction narrowed the gap between what the elite looked at and what everyone else could buy, which is the opposite of what this option claims.

• (a)Art was being produced for the open market. — This did happen. Painters who had depended on court and temple patronage moved to selling in the bazaar and to European buyers, and the Kalighat and Battala workshops were producing for an open market by the middle of the century.
• (b)The artist (Shilpi) became distinct from the artisan (Karigar). — This did happen. Colonial art schools imported the European hierarchy that ranks the fine artist above the craftsman, and the older world in which image-making was one skilled trade among many gave way to that split.
• (c)The technique of oil painting was developed. — This did happen. Oil painting was brought in by European artists working in India from the later eighteenth century and was taken up by Indian painters through the nineteenth, Raja Ravi Varma being the best-known of them.

Nineteenth-century Indian painting was reshaped by three things at once — the collapse of court patronage, the arrival of European techniques and academies, and the printing press. Company painting served British patrons in a hybrid style; the art schools at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay taught perspective and oils; and lithography and the woodcut created, for the first time, a picture cheap enough to be an ordinary purchase.

This is the hardest option set of the group, because option (d) sounds plausible: if the artist was being separated from the artisan, why would elite and popular art not separate too? The answer is that the two movements ran on different tracks. Professional status stratified, while the images themselves circulated more widely than ever, since a print run costs the same whoever buys it.

• Kalighat painters worked near the Kali temple in Calcutta, selling quick, bold watercolour pats to pilgrims and townspeople.
• The Battala presses of north Calcutta turned out cheap woodcut prints for a mass readership.
• Colonial art schools were founded at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay in the 1850s.
• Raja Ravi Varma set up a press in the 1890s to sell oleographs of his paintings by the thousand.

• A 'not a feature' stem, where three of the four options are true developments.
• Assuming that because artists were being professionally stratified, their audiences were too.

As which was not a feature, or as pairing a school of painting with its patrons and technique.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Kalighat paintings were produced mainly for

  • (a)Mughal court patrons
  • (b)pilgrims and townspeople buying in the bazaar
  • (c)European museums commissioning ethnographic studies
  • (d)temple walls at Puri

  Answer(b) pilgrims and townspeople buying in the bazaar — quick, bold watercolours made for the open market near the Kali temple in Calcutta.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Raja Ravi Varma's oleographs are significant in Indian art history because they

  • (a)revived the Mughal miniature tradition
  • (b)made mass-produced prints of his paintings available cheaply and widely
  • (c)were the first Indian works exhibited in Europe
  • (d)were painted entirely in watercolour

  Answer(b) made mass-produced prints of his paintings available cheaply and widely — his press turned single canvases into images found in ordinary homes.