Dr Mildred Archer who died on February 4th 2005 aged 93 was the wife of Dr William “Bill” Archer OBE, MA (Cantab), D.Litt who died in 1979. For several decades she had been Curator of the Prints and Drawings Department at the old India Office Library before it amalgamated with the British Library. It was through her pioneering work on cataloguing those diverse and unknown collections that a new branch of art history came into being, an art form she called “Company” painting; art that had been drawn by European or Indian artists during the time of the East India Company.