8 | | A valuable account of the art schools is given by T. Guha-Thakurta (1992), who points out that by the end of the 19th C. the art schools had managed to establish the idea that art could be a respectable vocation, in terms of the status of ‘high art’, as well as a career in terms of the middle-class employment opportunities offered by an ‘applied arts’ approach: ‘Art, indicating painting and sculpture, and the “applied arts”, indicating technical skills of draughtsmanship, engraving, etching or lithography, were not considered two separate spheres, but two essential aspects of the same profession.’ Extending the naturalist and neo-classical modes of British painting in India, the new academicism of the art schools, legitimated by e.g. portrait commissions from the British and Indian ruling classes, also fed into the diversified conventions of the [[Company School]] as Indian artists formerly under feudal patronage started selling their wares in urban market-places. The academic style, both in genre and manner, had a function analogous to that of operatic style in the [[Parsee Theatre]]: it created a new hierarchy of taste in competition with classicist brahminical aspirations while maintaining an opposition to native popular arts which sought to assimilate industrial technology differently (cf. [[Pat Painting]] and [[Raja Ravi Varma]] for alternative solutions). |
| 8 | A valuable account of the art schools is given by T. Guha-Thakurta (1992), who points out that by the end of the 19th C. the art schools had managed to establish the idea that art could be a respectable vocation, in terms of the status of ‘high art’, as well as a career in terms of the middle-class employment opportunities offered by an ‘applied arts’ approach: ‘Art, indicating painting and sculpture, and the “applied arts”, indicating technical skills of draughtsmanship, engraving, etching or lithography, were not considered two separate spheres, but two essential aspects of the same profession.’ Extending the naturalist and neo-classical modes of British painting in India, the new academicism of the art schools, legitimated by e.g. portrait commissions from the British and Indian ruling classes, also fed into the diversified conventions of the [[Company School Painting|Company School]] as Indian artists formerly under feudal patronage started selling their wares in urban market-places. The academic style, both in genre and manner, had a function analogous to that of operatic style in the [[Parsee Theatre]]: it created a new hierarchy of taste in competition with classicist brahminical aspirations while maintaining an opposition to native popular arts which sought to assimilate industrial technology differently (cf. [[Pat Painting]] and [[Raja Ravi Varma]] for alternative solutions). |