An elephant with a howdah

This Company Painting is from a series of 40 illustrating modes of transport, occupations, entertainers, ascetics and Muharram subjects. (Company Paintings were so-called because they were made by Indian artists for the British in India.) Paintings on mica (talc) were produced in Murshidabad, Patna and Varanasi (Benares) in eastern India and in Tiruchirapalli (Trichinopoly) in the south. Indian artists had long used the material for preserving tracings of their family paintings. But sets of pictures depicting occupations, ceremonies, vehicles and so forth were made exclusively for European patrons.