Impey Album

The Impey Album was a collection of Company style paintings commissioned by Elijah Impey (1732–1809) and his wife Mary, née Reade (1749–1818), of the animals in their menagerie in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, where Elijah was chief justice of the Supreme Court.

[1] Between 1777 and 1782,[2] the Impeys hired local artists to paint the various birds, animals and native plants, life-sized where possible, and their natural surroundings.

The collection, often known as the Impey Album, is an important example of Company style painting.

Mary also kept extensive notes about habitat and behaviour, which were of great use to later biologists such as John Latham in his work on Indian birds.

[8][5][9][10][11] The twelve pictures (eleven by Zain ud-Din) given to the Radcliffe Science Library are now on loan to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford,[12] and between October 2012 and April 2013 were exhibited at the Ashmolean as part of an exhibition entitled Lady Impey's Indian Bird Paintings.