Nepali art took a radical turn from the traditional to a contemporary European vein towards the mid 19th century and the earliest known Nepali artist to have incorporated western realism in his work was a local artist from Patan, Rajman Singh Chitrakar.
The 1802 British expedition to Nepal by surgeon-naturalist Francis Buchanan-Hamilton was seminal for two reasons—it introduced 1,100 species of plants to the world of botany and it gave the world the very first scientific map of Nepal.