Local artists in colonial India adapted their painting for English patrons. What did the resulting mixture of traditional and European style come to be known as?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → Company School of Painting
Option (1) Bengal School of Art — Incorrect. This was a nationalist movement led by Abanindranath Tagore. It turned away from European taste towards an Indian style.
Option (2) Academic style of painting — Incorrect. This was oil painting taught in the British art schools, using a European medium for Indian subjects.
Option (3) Company School of Painting — Correct. Local artists mixed their traditional way with the European habit of close observation to please their English patrons.
Option (4) Pan-Asian style of painting — Incorrect. Pan-Asianism was Okakura’s idea of uniting India with other eastern nations against western imperialism.
Note: This topic was not named in the CUET 2026 syllabus, but it was part of the NCERT chapter. In 2025 and 2026, NTA also asked questions on topics in NCERT that the CUET syllabus did not name. So our mocks have questions from every part of the NCERT chapter, to give you enough practice. Read the whole chapter, not only the sub-topics named in the syllabus.
NCERT (2026-27): “Company Painting …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.…” |