Company style of painting is a mixture of which of the following styles?

(A) Folk style of painting

(B) Indian traditional style of painting

(C) Pattachitra

(D) Madhubani style of painting

(E) European style of painting

Choose the correct answer from the options given below:

(B) and (E) only

The correct answer is Option 3- (B) and (E) only

The mixture of traditional and European styles of painting in colonial India came to be known as the Company School of Painting.

Art in India had a different purpose prior to the coming of the British. It could be seen as statues on temple walls, miniature paintings that often illustrated manuscripts, decoration on the walls of mud houses in villages, among many other examples. With the colonial rule around the eighteenth century, the English were charmed by different manners and customs of people of all ranks, tropical flora and fauna, and varying locales. Partly for documentation and partly for artistic reasons, many English officers commissioned local artists to paint scenes around them to get a better idea of the natives. The paintings were largely made on paper by local artists, some of whom had migrated from erstwhile courts of Murshidabad, Lucknow or Delhi. To please their new patrons, they had to adapt their traditional way of painting to document the world around them. This meant that they had to rely more on close observation, a striking feature of the European art, rather than memory and rule books, as seen in traditional art. It is this mixture of traditional and European style of painting that came to be known as the Company School of Painting. This style was not only popular among the British in India but even in Britain, where albums, consisting a set of paintings were much in demand.