Mary Impey

Mary Impey (2 March 1749 – 20 February 1818) was an English natural historian and patron of the arts in Bengal. The wife of Elijah Impey, the Chief Justice of Bengal, she established a menagerie in Calcutta and commissioned Indian artists to paint the various creatures.

Born Mary Reade in Oxfordshire, she was the eldest of the three children of John and Harriet Reade. In 1768, at Hammersmith parish church (Fulham North Side) then just outside London, she married a thirty-six-year-old barrister, Elijah Impey, and over the next five years bore him four children. In 1773, Elijah Impey was made chief justice of Fort William in Bengal and the couple moved to India, leaving the children with their father's brother in Hammersmith. In 1775, having settled in Fort William, Impey started a collection of native birds and animals on the extensive gardens of the estate, which had formerly been that of Henry Vansittart, governor of Bengal from 1760 to 1764.

Beginning in 1777, Impey hired local artists to paint the various birds, animals and native plants, life-sized where possible, and in natural surrounds. The collection, often known as the Impey Album, is an important example of Company style painting. She 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. The three artists who are known were Sheikh Zain al-Din, Bhavani Das, and Ram Das. More than half the over 300 paintings made were of birds. The collection was dispersed in an auction in 1810, and several pieces are in various museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with 3 in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and 18 in the Radcliffe Science Library of the University of Oxford. The pictures given to the Radcliffe Science Library are now on loan to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Between October 2012 and April 2013 the paintings were exhibited at the Ashmolean as part of an exhibition entitled "Lady Impey's Indian Bird Paintings".

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