Mildred Archer
Encyclopedia
Mildred Archer OBE
Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...

 (28 December 1911 in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 — 4 February 2005) was an English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 art historian who specialized in 18th and 19th century art in British India. She was curator of Prints and Drawings at the India Office Library and wrote extensively on the collection and studies on them.

Born Mildred Agnes Bell, she attended school in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. In 1930 she joined St Hilda's College, Oxford
St Hilda's College, Oxford
St Hilda's College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England.The college was founded in 1893 as a hall for women, and remained an all-women's college until 2006....

 with a history scholarship. She met Bill Archer, who had been a friend of her brother at Cambridge. Bill had passed the Indian Civil Service examination and was in the School of Oriental Studies, London. Bill left for India in 1931 and the two were engaged just before he left. After marriage Bill worked in Bihar
Bihar
Bihar is a state in eastern India. It is the 12th largest state in terms of geographical size at and 3rd largest by population. Almost 58% of Biharis are below the age of 25, which is the highest proportion in India....

 for nearly a decade and on his return to England he became Keeper of Indian Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...

 and was a leading scholar of Indian court painting and the Company style
Company style
Company style or Company painting is a term for a hybrid Indo-European style of paintings made in India by Indian artists, many of whom worked for European patrons in the British East India Company or other foreign Companies in the 18th and 19th centuries...

.

Mildred Archer's curatorial career began in 1954 with the cataloguing of the East India Company's
British East India Company
The East India Company was an early English joint-stock company that was formed initially for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but that ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and China...

 collection of paintings in the collection of the India Office
India Office
The India Office was a British government department created in 1858 to oversee the colonial administration of India, i.e. the modern-day nations of Bangladesh, Burma, India, and Pakistan, as well as territories in South-east and Central Asia, the Middle East, and parts of the east coast of Africa...

 Library. It occupied her for 26 years.

Other works included Natural History Drawings (1962), British Drawings (1969), Company Drawings (1972), Indian Popular Painting (1977) and finally (with Toby Falk) Indian Miniature Paintings (1981). In 1979 she wrote British Portraiture 1770-1825. Her later publications inclduded a study of the Daniell aquatint
Aquatint
Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching.Intaglio printmaking makes marks on the matrix that are capable of holding ink. The inked plate is passed through a printing press together with a sheet of paper, resulting in a transfer of the ink to the paper...

s of India (1980), the V&A exhibition catalogue India Observed (1982), and studies of William Simpson's Indian sketchbooks (1986) and the prints and Company paintings associated with James and William Fraser (1989). Her last book was India Served and Observed (1994).

External links

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