A Gift Without Strings: Tate Receives Fifty Paintings From British India

Most major gifts to British museums come with some quiet financial engineering. The Cultural Gifts Scheme and Acceptance in Lieu let donors offset tax against the art they hand over, and much of the national collection was built that way. That is what makes this week’s news from Tate Britain stand out. The art historian Charles Greig has given the museum 50 paintings, watercolours and miniatures made in India during the 18th and 19th centuries, and he has done it outright, with no tax benefit to himself. Speaking to Apollo, he called the arrangement “unprecedented this century”.

The gift arrived at Tate in September and was announced on 26 October. The public will have to be patient, as the works go on show in a free, dedicated display at Tate Britain in 2028. Still, it is worth understanding now what has arrived and why it matters.

Forty-five years of looking

Greig spent about 45 years building the collection, and until recently it hung in his late 17th-century house in west London. His interest began on a first trip to India after university, at the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, whose paintings he later catalogued. He bought his first picture in 1982. It was Arthur William Devis’s The Manufacture of Saltpetre at Patna, a scene of two Indian workers in a thatched hut in which, he notes, the British are nowhere to be seen.

That detail tells you what the collection is about. Collectors in the 1980s mostly wanted grand imperial images: governors, durbars and triumph. Greig wanted pictures that showed how artists, European and Indian alike, actually looked at the people and places in front of them. He has described himself throughout as “a temporary steward”.

What’s in the crates

The best-known painting is Johann Zoffany’s 1784 Portrait of Prince Jawan Bakht, heir apparent to the Mughal throne, painted in Lucknow on the very evening Zoffany arrived there with Warren Hastings. Greig calls it “arguably the most important portrait of an Indian by a European artist that exists”. According to Tate, it becomes one of only three Zoffany portraits of individual Indian sitters in UK public collections. Three smaller portraits of the same prince by Indian artists come with it, so visitors will be able to compare how two traditions saw one man.

There are landscapes by William Hodges, whom Greig considers the finest of the British painters who worked in India. They include a view of Hill Munger in Bihar from 1781 and the first European depiction of Lucknow, which the scholar Mildred Archer found in a junk shop in the 1970s. Thomas and William Daniell are represented, as is Rudolf Swoboda, whose portrait of a 23-year-old sepoy was painted for Queen Victoria and is the first of his works to enter a British museum.

There are also oddities, such as a 1722 Calcutta street scene by a Colonel Christopher Green about whom almost nothing is known.

Company painting comes to Millbank

For Tate, the most significant arrivals may be the works by Indian artists. The collection includes three watercolours by Sita Ram, who recorded Lord Hastings’s journey from Calcutta to the Punjab in 1814–15, and a panorama of the Diwan-i-Am in Delhi’s Red Fort by Ghulam Ali Khan, a former Mughal court painter who went on to work for East India Company officers.

These works belong to a genre known as “Company painting”. Indian artists trained in Mughal and regional traditions adapted their techniques for British patrons, combining fine detail and flat, jewel-like colour with European perspective and naturalism. Many UK readers first met this material properly in William Dalrymple’s Forgotten Masters exhibition at the Wallace Collection in 2019–20. Until now, Tate had none of it.

That matters because Tate is the national collection of British art, and this gift quietly widens what “British art” includes. Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, said it would “broaden the range of people and histories represented in the national collection”.

Keeping it here

Greig’s other motive is a market one. He told Apollo that paintings of this kind have recently been leaving Britain “in very large numbers”, many of them returning to India, where collectors have rightly become keen buyers of their own visual history. Some will welcome that flow. Greig’s view is that this collection, kept together, is a scholarly resource that would be lost if it were split up at auction, and that Britain needed to hold on to at least one such group.

You don’t need to settle that argument to see the value of what has happened. A collection that one person spent a lifetime studying will be kept together, catalogued and shown to everyone for free.

While you wait for 2028

If this has whetted your appetite, the British Library’s India Office collections hold some of the finest Company painting anywhere, and the V&A’s South Asia galleries are always worth a visit. Many independent galleries and dealers across the UK also handle Indian miniatures and works on paper, often at prices that would surprise anyone used to auction headlines. Our directory is a good place to start looking.