Kalighat paintings

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The British were bringing Western Academia to India- hence the Calcutta School of Art. A lot of traditional Pat painters migrated to Calcutta, also hoping for a better livelihood. Many settled around the Kalighat temple, and made traditional scroll paintings. Students who had passed out of the Calcutta School of Art, had started printing presses. English companies were circulating their own versions of Indian images into the Indian market. The famed Kalighat painters or Calcutta had to seriously contend with the oleograph, the wood-cut print, and the newsheet to make their work viable.

The outlines of the Kalighat paintings were simple, allowing them to be copied in the lithograph presses and then filled in with colour. (But only with the coming of the chromolithograph was it possible to render the vivid colour in these paintings.)

But the motifs did not only move one way.. while many cheap industrial copies of motifs and paintings developed by the pat artists were made, at the same time, the pat painters began incorporating motifs from these industrially produced pictures, which frequently worked Indian motifs with Western perpectivalism. ---