MILDRED ARCHER was for many years curator of Prints and Drawings at the India Office Library and a pioneering scholar both of British painting in India and of Indian painting for the British in the 18th and 19th centuries. To her prolific writings on these previously neglected subjects she brought a lucid historical style and a deep knowledge and love of India, first gained as the wife of an Indian Civil Service officer in Bihar.

When Mildred and her husband W. G. (Bill) Archer returned to England after Indian independence, he became Keeper of Indian Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum and a leading scholar of Indian court painting, and a few years later she took charge of the collections at the India Office Library. From the 1950s until Bill’s death in 1979, he and Mildred (known as Tim to friends) were always ready to help visiting colleagues or younger scholars and, between them, exercised a strong benign influence on Indian painting studies.

The daughter of a teacher, Mildred Agnes Bell was born in 1911 in London and attended school there. In 1930 she was awarded a history scholarship to St Hilda’s College, Oxford. By this time she already knew Bill Archer, who had been a friend of her brother at Cambridge. Having passed the Indian Civil Service examination, Bill was spending a probationer year at the School of Oriental Studies, London. Before he departed for India in 1931 they became engaged. A three-year separation followed, in which Bill worked at his first postings in Bihar and developed his strong interests in tribal arts and poetry, while Mildred threw herself into her medieval history studies at Oxford.

She also became an active member of the University Labour Club, in those Depression years the most flourishing of the Oxford student societies. Like Archer, she held strong socialist convictions and was among the students who turned out at Gloucester Green to feed the passing Jarrow Marchers. At the same time, she took drawing and engraving classes at the Ruskin School and, knowing she was soon bound for India, sought the company of Indian students at the Majlis or India Society. Much of the talk of the time was of Indian aspirations for freedom from British rule.

In 1934 Bill Archer was invalided home with heat stroke. This allowed them to marry in July and they later sailed for India. Mildred found little rapport with the pontificating memsahibs she met on the voyage out, and throughout their time in India the Archers were generally happier in the company of Indians, whether tribal villagers or urban intellectuals, than participating in the mores of the British club.

The Archers’ first postings in Bihar were in the southern Ranchi district and at Purnea in the north. Mildred enjoyed especially the cold-weather tours when they walked through the district from camp to camp, meeting the villagers and hearing their problems. She spent much time studying Indian history and helping to compile English textbooks for schools.

In 1942 the Archers experienced their most difficult time, when Bill, now in charge at the state capital of Patna, had to maintain order at a time of civil unrest. It was also at Patna, however, that they formed important friendships with local connoisseurs of Indian painting. The Archers began to collect Indian miniatures themselves, along with the folk and tribal paintings that they were already accumulating. Mildred spent many hours interviewing the traditional Patna painter Ishwari Prasad, and later they acquired his personal collection of pictures.

A happier time followed when Bill was transferred to the Santal Parganas, where they spent idyllic years among the “ever-singing” Santal tribals. In 1945 Mildred brought their two children to England for school, lodging in Oxford where she used the materials provided by Ishwari Prasad in her first book, Patna Painting (1947). Later she rejoined Bill in his final posting among the Naga tribals of Assam. They left India in 1948 with great sadness.

Mildred Archer’s distinguished curatorial career began in 1954, when Bill, as Keeper at the V&A, was asked by his India Office Library counterpart to catalogue “a few miscellaneous Indian paintings”. He passed this task on to Mildred, as they were already working together on a book on “Company” painting, Indian Paintings for the British (1955). The job was expected to take Mildred a few weeks. In fact it occupied her for the next 26 years.

Working at first on the draining-board of a staff tea-making room, Mildred soon catalogued the small pile of Company pictures that had been found for her. Then, prowling round the back rooms, she discovered in odd corners (or even up a chimney) parcels and portfolios containing a wealth of neglected British Indian art.

In due course a series of authoritative catalogues appeared, including her Natural History Drawings (1962), British Drawings (1969), Company Drawings (1972), Indian Popular Painting (1977) and finally (with Toby Falk) Indian Miniature Paintings (1981). She also wrote numerous articles, reviews and exhibition catalogues. In 1977 she received an Oxford DLitt in recognition of her published work and she was elected to an honorary fellowship by St Hilda’s. An OBE followed in 1979. In the same year her masterly India and British Portraiture 1770-1825 appeared, which deployed to the full her historical skills and knowledge of British India.

After Bill Archer’s death and her retirement from the library, Mildred eventually moved to the village of Dedham. With characteristic cheerful determination, she continued to work unceasingly. Her later publications, some written with other scholars, included a study of the Daniell aquatints 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). A catalogue of the V&A’s Company paintings appeared in 1992. Her last book was the charming memoir India Served and Observed (1994), combining autobiographical fragments left by Bill Archer with her own reminiscences of their early life.

Mildred Archer is survived by her son and daughter.

Mildred Archer, OBE, historian of the art of British India, was born on December 28, 1911. She died on February 4, 2005, aged 93.