Sheikh Zainuddin

Shaikh Zain-al-Din or Sheikh Zainuddin was an Indian Muslim artist who was most well-known for his contributions to the Impey Album and as one of the first artists that helped create the Anglo-Indian "Company style" of painting.

His works, along with the works of some of his notable contemporaries such as Bhawani Das and Ram Das, blended Mughal painting techniques and Western botanical illustration standards into some of the earliest examples of the aesthetic that became known as the Company style.

Career In the late eighteenth century, he worked under Lady Mary Impey, the wife of Sir Elijah Impey, Chief Justice of Calcutta Supreme Court.

The artists at the early Calcutta School created more than 300 pieces of art, also known as the Impey Album, over half of which depicted birds. The incredibly detailed images that the artists at the Calcutta School created were biologically accurate, and Lady Mary Impey also kept extensive notes about the habitat and behaviour of the animals that the artists featured. These detailed notes, in collaboration with the zoological illustrations Zain-al-Din and others created, would prove to be of great use to later biologists, such as the English ornithologist Dr. John Latham, who named several new species from them in his supplement to the General Synopsis of Birds (1787).

Among the three known artists Lady Impey brought from Patna to make realistic sketches of birds and animals of her private menagerie, Zain-al-Din was the most prolific.

From 1777 to 1782, Zainuddin worked on Whiteman art paper manufactured in England for his transparent watercolour paintings. For his tinted drawings and sketches, he employed meticulous calligraphic strokes reminiscent of the works of Mughal Court artist Ustad Mansur. The Ashmolean Museum has some of his art.

Exhibitions Zainuddin's work was first exhibited in 2016 at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, as part of the Flower Power exhibition. At that point his name, written in an old hand-writing was taken to be "Jack Joyenadey". Since then, researchers working together with the museum staff, have deciphered his name. The updated exhibition is online. Subsequently, Zainuddin's work was exhibited in 2019 at London's Wallace Collection, along with that of 17 other artists commissioned by the British East India Company. The director of the Wallace Collection, Xavier Bray, told Smithsonian that in Zainuddin's paintings, "Everything is incredibly precise and beautifully observant".