The term ‘Company painting’ is applied to works made by Indian artists for Europeans living and working in India. They especially catered to British employees of the East India Company, the trading firm that, by the 18th century, had acquired a territorial empire in India. Such paintings represent a fusion of traditional Indian artistic styles with conventions and technical features borrowed from western art. The British were especially keen to have visual records of the people and places that surrounded them: portraits of local dignitaries and depictions of the various castes and trades, the strange-looking deities and temples, the festivals and ceremonies, animals and means of transport.

This painting dates from about 1825 and depicts Parasurama, the sixth of the ten avatars (‘incarnations’) of the Hindu god Vishnu, who holds an axe and a lotus bud. It comes from a set of 100 made in Trichinopoly (Tiruchirappalli) in south India, probably for an Englishman with scholarly interests, since such intricately detailed studies of Hindu deities were comparatively rare among Company paintings.