In the Company Manner (2009), SDMA Gallery Rotation

Indian artists produced sets of paintings depicting Indian customs and occupations for the East India Company personnel to bring back to Britain in order to illustrate and validate the reports of their experiences and observations. These exceptionally finely wrought examples have been set in generic landscapes adopted from European watercolor paintings of the time. As is characteristic of painting for British Company patrons the viewer is a detached observer, for no figure confronts the viewer directly.
Depicted in one of the pages is the medical procedure called cupping, which was used as a remedy for physical ailments. The woman at the right presses a glass cup, in which the air has been heated, onto the other woman's back. The cup creates a vacuum and draws the blood to the surface of the skin. To this day, cupping continues to be used in traditional medicine practices worldwide.

Sonya Quintanilla (2014) Quebec
A woman cupping another
India, ca. 1815
Opaque watercolor on paper. 24.2 x 19.2 cm
Edwin Binney 3rd Collection, 1990.1377

Many Company School painters were instructed to depict Indian customs and occupations so that East India Company personnel, upon returning to Britain, could illustrate and validate the reports of their experience. Often British merchants were especially drawn to unusual and seemingly exotic practices. The demand for these kinds of paintings and their dissemination across Europe (as they were often used as models for engravings to illustrate popular accounts of adventures in India) played a major role in the vogue for highly romanticized, stereotyped, and exoticized representations of all things «oriental» in the West. It became popular for European artists to create their own renditions of Indian themes and styles from their second-hand, outsider’s perspective. But while Indian painters were adopting the styles of their European counterparts, there was a parallel in art made for Indian consumption in which the exotic aspects of western subjects were emphasized and popularized. This two-way process of occidentalizing and orientalizing defines much of the artistic cross-cultural dialogue of the time.

Depicted in this scene, with a European-inspired generic setting, is the medical procedure called cupping, which was used as a remedy for physical ailments. The woman at the right presses a glass cup in which the air has been heated onto the other woman's back. The cup creates a vacuum and draws the blood to the surface of the skin. To this day, cupping continues to be used in traditional medicine practices worldwide.
Last Updated: 9/5/2017