Over the next century, the Thanjavur region increasingly came under British control, leading painters to incorporate techniques from the Company School of painting. The media used changed from ground colours on cloth and wood to gouache and watercolour on paper. The style also began to move beyond the court and reached new markets and classes of patrons. The British commissioned Thanjavur artists for ethnographic illustrations, while some Indian patrons employed them to make drawings of insects, birds and animals at this time.

Simultaneously, Thanjavur style religious paintings also underwent considerable change. Glossy, polished paintings of deities like Krishna, with cherubic forms and gilded decoration, were produced for a popular market. Hitherto static poses gave way to more naturalized depictions with some influence from Western academic realism. Expensive gold leaf was still applied to some of these works, while others began to use cheaper gold paper for embossing. Many of these innovations are still used in Thanjavur paintings today.

Contemporary Thanjavur paintings are large, framed objects meant to be hung on walls and seen from a distance. They are generally executed on wooden panels wrapped in cloth, leading them to be called palagai padam (“pictures on wood”) in Tamil. The wood of the jackfruit tree is usually preferred for this purpose. A sheet of cardboard is pasted onto the panel, with gum sometimes made from tamarind seed. One or two layers of cloth are applied, coated with lime, and smoothed down using a stone or shell. This prepared surface is painted on with brush, leaving out the places where gems are to be set. Unboiled limestone, ground and mixed with glue, is used to mark the spots where decorations are to be applied. Gems or stones are directly embedded on the marks first, followed by gold paper. Embossing is achieved by pressing the foil down with the pointed end of a paintbrush. More recent Thanjavur paintings bear heavier applications of gold work and a few dark, rich shades of colour. The background colours used include deep greens, blues or reds; the main figures are usually executed in white, yellow, green or blue.

The influence of the Thanjavur painting style has had considerable geographic and temporal range. According to some scholars, elements of the style influenced paintings produced as far away as Solapur in Maharashtra as well as various parts of Karnataka in the eighteenth century. Its depiction of deities with a hybrid of southern Indian and European styles influenced realist painters like Raja Ravi Varma as well as popular art such as prints and calendar paintings through the twentieth century and up to the present day.

Although the tradition of Thanjavur painting was historically limited to men of the Kshatriya caste, efforts have been made to open it up to others in recent years. The Tamil Nadu Handicrafts Development Corporation has conducted training courses in Thanjavur painting exclusively for women. Thanjavur paintings continue to be extremely popular as tourist memorabilia and objects of worship, and are among the most recognisable south Indian paintings today.