Figure 3.1 William Hodges, ‘View of the Rajmahal Hills with a Sentenial [sic] in the Foreground’, c. 1781 (YCBA, B1978.43.1740)
Places
The landscapes of India provided some of the richest and most enduring aspects of the British engagement with the subcontinent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indian cities and countryside presented a wealth of ‘valuable subjects for the painter’.1 India’s great rivers, wide plains and imposing mountain ranges provided unrivalled visual raw material. And this natural beauty was complemented by evidence of the human presence in the landscape: imposing architectural monuments, temples, mosques, bridges and even ruins. This chapter charts some of the ways in which artists responded to these subjects. William Hodges offers a useful introduction to the representation of landscape. Not only was he well connected in East India Company circles in Bengal, making him party to the latest thinking of Company officials like Warren Hastings, but he was also a genuine artistic innovator. His time with James Cook, on his voyages of exploration to the South Pacific, as well as his own artistic training, made Hodges acutely aware of the power of landscape. And his work in India goes beyond the topographical recording of places to convey something of the artist’s personal response to the sights before him. In considering Hodges’s thoughtful engagement with Indian landscape scenes, we are led to one of the central themes in this chapter: the importance of aesthetic and artistic influences on artists. What role did philosophical concepts like the picturesque or the sublime play in creating images of India? Should Indian landscapes reflect or attempt to convey, in some way, the comforts of ‘home’? Or should artists seek out and emphasise the unusual and the extraordinary: things that would immediately advertise India’s difference from everything European?
But the immensity, grandeur and sheer visual excitement on display in India could not be contained wholly within aesthetic categories. And artistic sensibilities were not immune from the scale and beauty of the landscape or the variety and antiquity of the architecture. The chapter moves on, then, to consider artists who were inspired by the evidence before their eyes. People like James Baillie Fraser, Samuel Davis and the Daniells were inspired to travel across India and to record scenes and locations for European audiences. Their journeys followed the geographical contours determined by the political and imperial reach of the East India Company, and the visual records derived from these travels similarly contain elements of that encounter between East and West.
The chapter concludes by considering the human element that underpinned all of these representations. Whether they were inspired by classical precedents or by everyday activities, artists used scenes of landscape to comment on the human condition, as they saw it, in India. Landscape offered a visual directory of human activity over the centuries: the influence of religion, the movement of people, the rise and fall of empires, the advance of technology. And certain places were especially important focal points: the Taj Mahal at Agra and the Hindu holy city of Benares, for example, offered particularly impressive visual material for European artists. In representing these places in their own distinctive style, these artists played their part in creating visual expectations in viewers that would endure for centuries.
Figure 3.1 William Hodges, ‘View of the Rajmahal Hills with a Sentenial [sic] in the Foreground’, c. 1781 (YCBA, B1978.43.1740)
THE LANDSCAPES OF WILLIAM HODGES: BLAZING A TRAIL
The work of William Hodges offers interesting examples of the central role that landscape played in British visions of India. His skills and experiences as a painter meant that he evinced an unusually varied response to the landscapes of the subcontinent in his work. As a young man, Hodges had learned the classical picturesque formula for landscape from his mentor, Richard Wilson: to compose his paintings carefully, to manipulate and rearrange topography if required for the sake of effect, and even to introduce imaginary details as a means of instilling a sense of calm and order. But, during his time on James Cook’s expedition to the South Pacific, Hodges became one of the earliest professional artists to experiment with painting en plein air in an attempt to capture the fleeting effects of light, atmosphere and climate that he witnessed all around him. These experiences gave Hodges an unrivalled knowledge of different ways of composing landscape, and honed his judgement about the best way to present a scene for maximum visual impact. He put these lessons into practice during his time in India. As well as being patronised by Warren Hastings, Hodges made three tours from Calcutta: starting each time along the river Ganges and encountering towns of historical and architectural interest. Visiting Benares on his first tour, he reached as far as Agra on his third and most extensive tour, where he also saw the Taj Mahal. These travels gave Hodges a keen understanding of the possibilities for landscape artists working in India and he recorded his ideas in both images and text, giving us a valuable insight into his thoughts about the art of landscape (Fig. 3.1).
Figure 3.2 William Hodges, Storm on the Ganges, with Mrs Hastings near the Col-gon Rocks, 1790 (YCBA, B1973.1.23)
Hodges strove to understand the complex cultures and religions that he found around him in India. Rather like his work on the second of Cook’s Pacific voyages, he provides eloquent visual commentary on the societies through which he passed. Through the variety of his artistic and textual output, then, Hodges brought out the rich and complex history of India evident in its monuments, temples, scholarship and people. In many ways, Hodges thought of his representation of Indian landscape as a contribution to the understanding and interpretation of the ancient cultures of India, a process that was then current among many Europeans in the subcontinent (see Chapter 4). For Hodges, India was just as interesting, if not more so, than the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome to which educated eighteenth-century Europeans turned so frequently. Indeed, in a provocative pronouncement published in A Dissertation on the Prototypes of Architecture, Hindoo, Moorish and Gothic (1787), he asserted that Indian monuments, because of their antiquity, were the origin of some of the forms and details for which ancient Greek and Roman architecture were celebrated.
Hodges’s impressive rendition of a storm on the river Ganges encapsulates something of his working methods in India, and his use of landscape for both intellectual and visual effect (Fig. 3.2). On one level, the picture records a scene of deep personal interest for Hodges’s patron, Warren Hastings, depicting the events of 1782 when Hastings fell gravely ill and his wife made a dangerous voyage of three days down the Ganges to be with him. It subsequently became the focus of Hastings’s art collection at Daylesford, his country residence in Gloucestershire, where it hung above the chimney-piece in the picture room there. But it is more than a mere transcription of an event. Instead, it is an attempt by Hodges to use local circumstances, climate and light to convey a broader point about the human condition. The composition and pictorial elements are carefully deployed to create a sense of the landscape functioning as an allegory of the trials and dangers of human existence. Hodges was familiar with this part of the river from his time in India, and he described it in his Travels in India:
The country about Colgong is, I think, the most beautiful I have seen in India. The waving appearance of the land, its fine turf and detached woods, backed by the extensive forests on the hills, brought to my mind many of the fine parks in England; and its overlooking the Ganges, which has more the appearance of an ocean at this place than of a river, gives the prospect inexpressible grandeur.2
In this image, however, Hodges used the elements that comprised the landscape to add dynamism and drama. The scene is suffused with energy and the possibility of impending disaster. Mrs Hastings is hidden beneath the white canopy of the small vessel and only the figures of the boatmen are visible. Their fate hangs in the balance as the crew of Indians, grasping at oars and the tiller, engage in a desperate struggle to guide the boat between the forbidding rocks and the fierce water. The vessel navigates a treacherous path between the shore in the darkened foreground of the picture, where an ominously barren tree reaches out over the rapids, and an island in the river to the right. This island, where a tree in full leaf emerges in the sunlight beyond the storm, together with a bright rainbow springing upwards over the entire scene, seems to promise a brighter future once the trial of the storm has been endured and overcome. The equivalence between the painted scene and the condition of Hastings at this time hardly needs to be underlined. But Hodges’s success in creating such a powerful and evocative visual image alludes both to his prowess as an artist and to the power of landscape painting in his hands.
Figure 3.3 William Hodges, View of Warren Hastings’s House at Alipur and Two Figures in the Foreground, c. 1782 (YCBA, B1978.43.1783)
Figure 3.4 William Hodges, Marmalong Bridge, with a Sepoy and Natives in the Foreground, 1783 (YCBA, B1974.3.8)
Despite his willingness to experiment with new forms and techniques, Hodges never discounted the more traditional European aesthetic forms of representing landscape when he deemed them suitable for his purposes. In some of his work for Warren Hastings, for example, he introduced the European presence into the Indian landscape using elements drawn from the tenets of the picturesque. His canvas depicting Hastings’s house at Alipur offers a visual equivalent to the judgement of Benjamin Mee, a Calcutta-based merchant and financier (Fig. 3.3). Mee wrote to his brother-in-law in Hampshire, offering the opinion that ‘Mr Hodges’ pictures of India make it look like noblemen’s seats’.3 Although the large tree in the foreground and the two figures serve to anchor the scene firmly in India, the presence of the European residence appears to be a natural feature of the landscape and not unlike many pictures of grand country houses in Britain being painted at the time. Hodges’s landscapes also give us an insight into his views about the current state of India. His depiction of the so-called Marmalong Bridge, for instance, provides evidence of the positive influence of outsiders on the landscape of India (Fig. 3.4). The bridge, initially funded by an Armenian merchant, might be seen as an example of these outsiders’ capacity to improve India by their presence. The parallel with the East India Company, and Hastings’s activities in India on its behalf, could not have been clearer.
THE AESTHETICS OF LANDSCAPE: THE COMFORTS OF HOME
An interest in landscape was not confined to William Hodges, of course. Representations of landscape in eighteenth-century Britain were central to artistic practice and to notions of national and cultural identity. Unsurprisingly then, artistic training and aesthetic ideas acquired in Europe made a significant impact on the way in which artists responded to Indian scenes. The visual representation of India by British artists was heavily influenced by artistic and aesthetic preferences in Europe. Ideas about what made a good picture, what comprised an interesting view or what constituted an aesthetically pleasing composition were deeply affected by prevailing fashions and trends in European art. In some cases, they drew on specific philosophical criteria in order to compose their images and to convey their impressions of India. Ideas of the picturesque, for example, encouraged people to look at nature as they would view a painting. Simply put, the picturesque meant literally ‘like a picture’. Landscapes in this mode were harmonious and coherently composed. Irregularity, abrupt shapes and outlines, and intricate details were permitted too, however, as a way of underlining the ‘naturalness’ of the scene.
Figure 3.5 Thomas Daniell and William Daniell, ‘View of Calcutta from the Garden Reach’, A Picturesque Voyage to India; by the Way of China, 1810 (150.i.10)
One of the results of such depictions was the creation of aesthetic and visual connections with Europe. Thousands of miles away from their familiar surroundings, travellers and artists arriving in India sought visual equivalences with home where they could find them and created them where they could not. Some of the more salubrious areas around Calcutta, where many European servants of the East India Company had their residences, were just such places where these connections with home were found or manufactured. Here the representation of landscape served to collapse the distance between India and Britain.
Garden Reach – a few miles downriver from the centre of Calcutta – was particularly lauded by travellers. It was ‘studded with elegant mansions’ and surrounded by charming lawns and ‘groves’, according to Eliza Fay.4 When he passed by in November 1777, William Hickey was ‘greatly pleased by a rich and magnificent view of a number of splendid houses. … The verdure throughout on every side was beautiful beyond imagination, the whole of the landscape being more luxuriant than I had any expectation of seeing in the burning climate of Bengal.’5 And the remarks of the tea merchant Thomas Twining, upon first seeing the scene, are indicative of how other Europeans viewed it at the time:
Handsome villas lined the left or southern bank, and on the opposite shore was the residence of the superintendent of the Company’s botanical garden. It was a large upper-roomed house not many yards from the river, along the edge of which the garden itself extended. The situation of the elegant garden houses, as the villas on the left bank were called, surrounded by verdant grounds laid out in the English style, with the Ganges flowing before them, covered with boats and shipping, struck me, as it does everybody who sees it for the first time, as singularly delightful. These charming residences announced our approach to the modern capital of the East, and bespoke the wealth and luxury of its inhabitants.6
The scene may have announced the approach of Calcutta but it did so in decidedly European terms.
And these textual descriptions found a visual equivalence in Thomas and William Daniell’s depiction of Garden Reach, which was published as a print in their A Picturesque Voyage to India by the Way of China in 1810 (Fig. 3.5). The scene incorporates a view of Calcutta in the distance, with the imposing Government House silhouetted against the skyline. The inclusion of this structure underlines the importance and power of the East India Company which underpinned the British presence in Bengal and made scenes such as these at Garden Reach possible. Indeed, the history and evolution of the image itself provides a salutary reminder of the momentous changes that were taking place in India at the end of the eighteenth century under an increasingly confident British rule. This scene at Garden Reach had originally been drawn during the Daniells’ stay in Calcutta. But, by the time they came to publish A Picturesque Voyage, the old Government House had been replaced with a new one by Richard Wellesley, the Governor-General at the turn of the nineteenth century. In order to remain up to date, therefore, the Daniells had to rely on other images – possibly an aquatint by James Moffat published in 1805 – for the depiction of the new Government House here.
As a scene of picturesque beauty in Calcutta, Garden Reach was not unique. North of the city, a similar process of managing the landscape to make it conform to European standards took place. Not content with altering the skyline of the city by building a new Government House, Wellesley had appropriated a garden villa at Barrackpore, a military cantonment some fourteen miles north of Calcutta, in order to act as a kind of summer residence for the Governor-General. Richard Wellesley, second Earl of Mornington (subsequently first Marquess Wellesley; eldest brother of Arthur, Duke of Wellington), had travelled to India in 1798 to take up the position of Governor-General in Bengal. In doing so, he had assumed the principal post in Company-controlled India. Laid out on the banks of the river, the house at Barrackpore offered some key aesthetic advantages, and it became a kind of a ‘regal palace on fair Hooghly’s stream’, in the words of Charles D’Oyly.7 The whole scene presented a kind of sylvan paradise, according to Wellesley’s friend Lord Valentia: ‘The situation of the house is much more pleasing than any thing I have yet seen’, and it was surrounded by ‘groves of lofty trees’. Even the water was ‘much clearer than at Calcutta, and covered with state barges and cutters of the Governor-General. These, painted green, and ornamented with gold, contrasted with the scarlet dresses of the rowers, were a great addition to the scene.’ The final coup de grâce was offered by the gardens of Barrackpore Park, which were laid out in the ‘English style’.8 Indeed, so proud was Wellesley of his achievements that he expressly requested that Valentia’s travelling companion, the accomplished draughtsmen Henry Salt, stay ‘behind me to take views of the place’.9 Other travellers were almost unanimous in their approval and commendation, regarding Barrackpore as a kind of country estate transplanted to India. Emily Eden wrote that it felt ‘something like home … a beautiful fresh, green park, a lovely flower garden. … It is much cooler here, and we can step out in the evening and walk a few hundred yards undisturbed.’10 William Hickey was equally impressed by the grounds, which ‘were very pretty laid out with extraordinary taste and elegance, upon different parts of which he [Wellesley] erected a theatre, a riding-house, with probably the finest aviary and menagerie in the world, the latter two being stocked with the rarest and most beautiful birds, and beasts equally uncommon, collected from every quarter of the globe’.11 The visual depictions of artists like Edward Hawke Locker and James Baillie Fraser replicate these words in their images, offering scenes of order and tranquillity that might just as easily have been in the home counties (Figs 3.6 and 3.7).
Figure 3.7 Robert Havell, after James Baillie Fraser, ‘A View of Barrackpore House, with the Reach of the River’, in James Baillie Fraser, Views of Calcutta and its Environs, part 4, 1824–26 (X 644(10))
Despite the popularity and usefulness of homely, picturesque depictions of the subcontinent, this was not the only way in which the landscapes of India could be represented. European aesthetic notions of the sublime, codified most famously by Edmund Burke in the middle of the eighteenth century, existed to represent the unusual and potentially threatening. For artists and travellers in India, the sublime offered a way of interpreting those scenes that could not easily be compared to reassuringly familiar images of home. It provided a set of compositional strategies and aesthetic devices for representing the unusual places of the subcontinent. One European visitor to ‘the grand cave of Cannara [Kanheri]’ was adamant that it ‘must ever be considered by a man of taste as an object of beauty and sublimity’.12 And, back in Britain, Joshua Reynolds was aware of the capacity for India to produce the uncommon and the unusual as he commented on the ‘barbarick splendour of those Asiatick buildings, which are now publishing’. He felt that they might ‘furnish an architect, not with models to copy, but with hints of composition and general effect, which would not otherwise have occurred’.13
As the account of the visitor to Kanheri suggests, some of the most ‘sublime’ places in India for British artists were the examples of rock-cut architecture. Elephanta was the smallest but also reportedly the oldest of the cave temples of western India. Located on an island five miles in circumference, and situated in the inlet between the mainland and the outer islands of Bombay, Elephanta or Gharipuri was named after the large granite formation just outside the main portico of the temple. To many visitors, this extraordinary structure seemed to depict an elephant with a tiger on its back. Elephanta had long attracted those keen to record its stark natural rock outcroppings. The earliest British drawings of the temple were probably done in 1712 by William Pyke, the military cartographer of the East India Company. He paid a covert visit as the Company fought against the Maratha kingdom for control of western India. At the end of the century, James Wales described Elephanta as having ‘the grandest and most magnificent scenery I ever beheld, every part, every station presented pictures of astonishing beauty’.14 Wales would go on to become one of the most important British artists to record these extraordinary formations (Fig. 3.8). Sir Charles Warre Malet, the British Resident at the court of the Maratha Peshwa in Poona (today’s Pune), remarked on the extraordinary mixture of natural formation and architectural carving:
Figure 3.8 James Phillips, after James Wales, ‘Interior View of the Principal Excavated Temple on the Island of Elephanta’, 1790 (P182)
Figure 3.9 Thomas Daniell, after James Wales, ‘The Mountains of Ellora’, Hindoo Excavations in the Mountains of Ellora, plates 1–3, 1803 (P2890–2)
Whether we consider the design, or contemplate the execution of these extraordinary works, we are lost in wonder at the idea of forming a vast mountain into almost eternal mansions: the mythological symbols and figures throughout the whole, leave no room to doubt their owing their existence to religious zeal, the most powerful and most universal agitator of the human mind.15
Although the caves had already excited the attention of scholars and some artists, no complete visual record of them had been made. James Wales changed all of that, offering a series of powerful images that capture the distinctiveness of these features. Born in Peterhead, on the north-east coast of Scotland, Wales followed the path taken by many British artists in the late eighteenth century, seeking permission from the East India Company to go to India. He applied to work in Bombay in 1790, was granted permission on 5 January 1791, and arrived in India on 15 July of the same year. While Bombay was a smaller and less affluent market than Calcutta or Madras for a British painter, Wales was fortunate enough to meet Sir Charles Warre Malet. In addition to working for Malet, Wales painted a number of remarkable portraits of the Maratha chiefs and their ministers. But he is perhaps most famous for his detailed studies of the extraordinary rock-cut architecture of western India, and the series of thirty-four caves at Ellora, excavated between the sixth and eighth centuries ce, in particular. The depiction of these caves is indebted to Wales’s fortuitous meeting with the Daniells when they visited Bombay in March 1793. He was already engaged on his studies when he met them. They encouraged him to continue his detailed drawings of Indian caves and temples, and later they played an important role in bringing them to the attention of the general public in Britain. Wales took them to see some of the rock-cut temples close to the city, including that on the island of Elephanta. The Daniells did not see Ellora, and Wales himself did not go there until the spring of 1795, after they had left India. Wales intended to produce a major publication on the caves, with engravings after his drawings. While working at the Kanheri cave in October 1795, however, he caught a fever and died before the work was complete. But, through the combined efforts of Charles Warre Malet and the Daniells, James Wales’s work reached the public: the Daniells used his sketches, brought back to Britain by Malet, to produce a series of aquatint views of the temples of Ellora, which were published in 1803 (Fig. 3.9). The Daniells’ images were intended to appeal to the scholarly as well as the aesthetic impulses of connoisseurs and to offer a thorough and exact sourcebook on Hindu architecture.
Figure 3.10 Thomas Daniell and William Daniell, ‘Near Bandell on the River Hoogly’, Oriental Scenery, IV, plate 8, 1797–98 (Tab.599.a/b(4))
TRAVELLING ARTISTS
The meeting between Wales and the Daniells reminds us that it was often by travelling beyond the confines of the Company’s redoubts on the coast that artists – professional and amateur alike – responded most fully to the variety of sights and scenes in India. Just as Hodges’s art was facilitated by his ability and inclination to move around and beyond East India Company-controlled territories, the Daniells’ expeditions through the subcontinent provided them with valuable material for their subsequent work. Their travels indicate the variety of places and experiences that European artists could sample in India, and show that there was no single response to Indian landscapes from European artists.
The Daniells landed in India in 1786 and travelled extensively over the next seven and a half years. Their first long tour took them westwards along the Ganges and through neighbouring regions, in the footsteps of Hodges. Their route was partly dictated by the convenience of starting in areas under British control and partly by their desire to emulate and exceed Hodges. In the end, they went a good deal further, reaching Delhi and even the foothills of the Himalayas. On their way back, they stopped at Sasaram in Bihar (as Hodges had done seven years before) to visit the majestic tomb of Sher Shah Sur. After a tour in the south in 1792 – visiting temples and hill forts that had featured in the recent conflict with Tipu Sultan – the Daniells called at Bombay where, as we have seen, they met James Wales. They joined him for a while before beginning the voyage home in 1793. Their numerous oil paintings, prints and magnificent aquatints of the six volumes of Oriental Scenery (published 1795–1808) constitute a detailed record of Indian architectural history, as well as an extraordinary visual account of their prolonged and profound artistic engagement with India (Figs 3.10–14).
But the Daniells were not the only artists whose travels fired their imagination and whose work demonstrates the impact of Indian topography. George Chinnery worked in India in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. He made his living through the lucrative business of portraiture but his real love was landscape and, throughout his time in the subcontinent, he worked to infuse his images with the local colour of the scenery and sights that he found all around him (Fig. 3.15). William Prinsep was a member of a great British Indian dynasty, being one of the eight sons of John Prinsep, an important East India Company merchant who traded in indigo and chintz in the 1770s and 1780s. As well as being a businessman and banker, William was an enthusiastic artist and traveller (Fig. 3.16). By 1837 he was able to afford a home on Garden Reach, ‘adjoining Kyd’s dock which … I had converted into a most pleasant residence with a painting studio commanding the best views up and down the river’.16
Another artist with deep ties to the East India Company was James Baillie Fraser. Fraser went to India in 1813 to make his fortune and to rescue troubled family estates in Scotland. When his initial forays in the Calcutta business world ended in failure, he decided to join his brother, William, in the service of the Company. At the end of the Nepal War of 1814–15, William was appointed Commissioner of Garhwal in the Himalayan foothills and his first task was to make an extensive tour. In summer 1815, therefore, the brothers travelled through the hill states: while William negotiated with their rulers, James sketched their dramatic landscapes. Towards the end of the tour, James struck out on his own, reaching as far as Gungotree, one of the sources of the Ganges, where he bathed in its waters. His account of the incident highlights the deep intellectual and artistic (and, in this case, physical) immersion in the landscape of the subcontinent that many British artists enjoyed:
Figure 3.17 Robert Havell, after James Baillie Fraser, ‘Gungotree, the Holy Shrine of Mahadeo’, 1820 (P48)
The water, just freed from the ice, was piercing cold; and it required no small effort of piety to stay long enough in it for the Brahmin to say the necessary prayers over the pilgrim. … Afterwards, with bare feet, we entered the temple, where worship was performed, a little bell ringing all the time.17
Fraser made a sketch of the scene and it was one of twenty drawings made on the tour that were published as aquatints in 1820 (Fig. 3.17). Later in the decade, he published a set of aquatints of Calcutta, where he had returned in a second attempt to become a businessman.
The life and career of Samuel Davis were similarly shaped by the evolving British Empire of the late eighteenth century. Born in the West Indies, Davies was appointed a cadet in the East India Company at the age of eighteen. He spent three years in Madras before taking up a position as ‘draftsman and surveyor’ on a British mission to the mountain states of Bhutan and Tibet in 1783. Led by Samuel Turner, the mission’s purpose was to renew British contact with the court of the Panchen Lama, first established in 1774 by George Bogle. The Tibetan authorities were suspicious, however, and were unwilling to allow a greater number into their territory than had accompanied the Bogle mission. As a result, Davis was left behind in Bhutan and forced to make his own way back to India. In the course of this journey, he made extensive records in watercolour and pencil of Bhutanese architecture and topography, which combine visual accuracy with warm sympathy for the people and places he encountered. In his subsequent account of the expedition, Turner recalled passing the scene shown in Davis’s watercolour: ‘Punukka is the winter residence of the Daeb Raja, and, as we were informed, his favourite seat: he has lavished large sums upon it’ (Fig. 3.18). The gardens, meanwhile, were ‘extensive, and well stocked, containing the orange, sweet and sour, lemon, lime, citron, pomegranates, peach, apple, pear and walnut trees’.18 Like so many others, Davis was also an acquaintance of the Daniells and, in 1813, William Daniell produced six aquatints based on Davis’s Bhutan paintings, and a further six in 1816 based on his views of the island of St Helena.
The trend of travel and recording continued well into the nineteenth-century heyday of the Company’s power in India. Amateurs and professionals turned to visual images to make sense of the landscapes they were encountering, as a way of transcribing and recording them for posterity, and as a means of interpreting the British – and by extension their own – presence there. Captain Robert Smith (1792–1882) of the 44th East Sussex Regiment – not to be confused with his older namesake, the garrison engineer at Delhi discussed below – had already had a most energetic career in the service of the burgeoning nineteenth-century British Empire before arriving in India in 1828. He had seen action in Sicily, Spain and North America, among other places. Like many soldiers of the period, he was an accomplished draughtsman and devoted much of his leisure to topographical sketching. A series of watercolours survive from his time in India, and depict some of the sites he visited there. These sites – including various places along the course of the river Ganges such as Benares, Chunar, Monghyr and Allahabad – had long been favoured by travelling artists, and Smith followed in some illustrious footsteps. His rendition of the fort at Allahabad, overlooking the important Hindu pilgrimage centre at the confluence of the Ganges and Jumna rivers, was built by the Mughal emperor Akbar from 1582 onwards (Fig. 3.19). But, despite its location in the heart of India, Smith’s deployment of the classic picturesque formula renders the scene in familiar terms, as one that might be witnessed along any suitably sinuous river bank.
The work of William Simpson, in the middle of the nineteenth century, demonstrates the continued importance of travel for the visual recording of India as well as the enduring influence of earlier generations of British artists on their successors in the subcontinent. Simpson came from a poor family in Glasgow and was self-educated as an artist. He made his name with his views of the Crimean War and was sent to India by the lithographers Day and Son to depict the events of 1857–8. The mutiny in the Company’s Bengal Army, and the wider popular uprising that it sparked, constituted the last act of the East India Company’s raj in India: the British government in Westminster hastily assumed the Company’s responsibilities as soon as order had been restored. But Simpson’s travels in India hark back to earlier artistic encounters with the subcontinent. Simpson wanted to arrive there with a keen visual sense of the kind of subject matter available to the artist. With that in mind, he prepared for his visit by studying the prints of Hodges and the Daniells in the India Office Library. And he interpreted his commission in the broadest possible way. He travelled extensively in India between 1859 and 1862, often in the party of the Governor-General, Lord Canning. But, in early 1861, he struck out on his own to explore parts of central India and Rajasthan. His image of the palace at Amber (today’s Amer) was probably worked up later from sketches made on that tour (Fig. 3.20). Simpson paid great attention to architectural details, as can be seen in this watercolour. The palace was built in stages from about 1600 and became the fortified residence of the local rulers before the foundation of the city of Jaipur in 1727. But, despite the apparent realism, there is also an interest in the composition and the rhythms of light and shade. Ultimately, Simpson’s project to produce a great book of Indian views never came to fruition. But his ambition to follow in the footsteps of the Daniells and others shows the power of art and travel to shape British representations of and ideas about India.
THE HUMAN PRESENCE IN THE LANDSCAPE
The representation of local architecture, as William Simpson’s image reminds us, played a crucial role in many British landscape depictions of India. Thomas Daniell noted, for example, that
Temples and other sacred structures of the Hindoos occur frequently on the banks of the Hoogley; and these buildings, of various forms, and in different situations, exposed or half concealed among deep and solemn groves, no less holy in the popular opinion, than the edifices they shelter, give an air of romantic grandeur.19
But, as well as offering a sense of ‘romantic grandeur’ or providing aesthetic impact, depictions of indigenous architecture could also be imbued with symbolic resonance. Buildings that represented the religious adherence of the local Indians offered artists a means of commenting on the societies and cultures in their midst. Landscapes that incorporated ruins, on the other hand, could denote the transience of life and the futility of human hubris and ambition.
William Hodges provides an example of the role of local architecture in his depiction of a group of temples at Deogarh in Bihar (Fig. 3.21). The image might have been painted for Augustus Cleveland, the District Collector for the province, with whom he stayed for several months in early 1782. Hodges is fulsome in his description of the scene:
A small village, famous for the resort of Hindoo pilgrims, this being a sacred spot. There are five curious pagodas here, of perhaps the very oldest construction to be found in India. They are simply pyramids, formed by putting stone on stone, the apex is cut off at about one seventh of the whole height of the complete pyramid, and four of them have ornamental buildings on top, evidently of more modern work, which are finished by an ornament made of copper, and gilt, perfectly resembling the trident of the Greek Neptune. … At Deogur multitudes of pilgrims are seen, who carry the water of the Ganges to the western side of the peninsula of India.20
Hodges’s extensive description of the site underlines the fact that visual transcriptions of such scenes were a crucial means of recording them and conveying this information to audiences. But, where the written text gave a detailed description, the painted image captured the novelty and majestic grandeur of the scene for Europeans. In both cases, Hodges emphasises the antiquity and inherent dignity of the buildings and the cultural values for which they stood.
We left Henry Salt sketching the Governor-General’s summer residence at Barrackpore. But he and his companion travelled much further afield and saw many more sites of interest in India. Salt had trained as an artist and, in June 1802, he left London and accompanied George Annesley, Viscount Valentia, as his secretary and draughtsman, on Valentia’s tour of the East. They visited India, Ceylon and the Red Sea before Valentia was sent on a mission into Abyssinia in 1805. On their return, Valentia wrote a volume of travel memoirs, and Salt published aquatints after his drawings, entitled Twenty-four Views taken in St Helena, the Cape, India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia and Egypt, in imitation of the successful Daniells. Valentia and Salt had reached India in early 1803 and, after an extensive tour in the north, they sailed to Ceylon. From there, they visited the south of India, arriving at Rameswaram on 25 January 1804. There they examined the town’s principal temple, which was a large complex of structures surrounded by an outer wall and entered through a series of vast pylons or gopuram (Fig. 3.22). Valentia was impressed:
The entrance to the temple was through a very lofty gateway, I should suppose about one hundred feet high, covered with carved work to the summit. It was pyramidically oblong, and ended in a kind of sarcophagus. … This massive workmanship reminded me of the ruins of Egyptian architecture. … The whole was well executed, and was the finest specimen of architecture I had seen in the East.21
Although Valentia’s comment about Egypt is clearly an attempt to interpret strange scenes by relating them to relatively more familiar ones, Henry Salt saw things rather differently. In contrast to Valentia, Salt focused on the liveliness of the scene and succeeded in combining a precise study of the archaeological details of the temple with a representation of its dynamism. Salt is less interested in the passing of time, then, and more interested in the lived experiences of those who moved in and around the buildings.
Just as the temples at Deogarh and Rameswaram represented the vitality and endurance of cultural traditions, so the recording and representation of monuments, mausoleums and ruins could make a powerful statement. On 25 January 1789, as they left the vicinity of the Taj Mahal to move on to Sikandra to draw Akbar’s mausoleum, the road there reminded the Daniells of the Appian Way outside Rome, with ruins on both sides. The variety of appearance and abrupt shape of the ruins offered a poignant reminder of the transience of all of mankind’s efforts in the face of the inexorable march of time. Kanauj, a once flourishing site (Fig. 3.23), moved Thomas Daniell to brood:
Figure 3.23 Thomas Daniell and William Daniell, ‘Cannoge on the River Ganges’, Oriental Scenery, IV, plate 12, 1797–98 (Tab.599.a/b(4))
It is impossible to look at these miserable remnants of the great city of Cannoge without the most melancholy sensations, and the strongest conviction of the instability of man’s proudest works. … The plains of India indeed present to mankind many a sad proof of the uncertainty of human glory.22
This point was emphasised when the Daniells visited the sixteenth-century mausoleum of Sher Shah Sur in February 1790 during their long sketching tour of upper India (Fig. 3.24). Travellers had long been struck by the stately sandstone tomb of Sher Shah, who had originally come to India to serve the sultans of Delhi but had succeeded in carving out his own independent state in eastern India incorporating parts of Bihar and Bengal, with its capital at Sasaram. With its imposing grandeur, echoes of faded glory, and stark reminder of the transience of existence, the building captured the imagination of many European artists too. The Daniells were certainly deeply impressed by the sober dignity of the tomb, finding that its ‘gloomy grandeur … awakens feelings rather painful than agreeable’.23
The engagement with ruins and faded glory could even go beyond individual buildings and encompass whole towns. This seems to have been the case with Sir Charles D’Oyly in a view of Patna taken from an album of sketches containing eighty drawings and eighty-three folios of views in Bengal and Bihar, done between January 1823 and May 1825 (Fig. 3.25). Patna suffered severe economic hardship as a result of the changing business conditions of late eighteenth-century India. Where Calcutta and other large urban centres flourished on account of the increased export business passing though them, many older cities declined. This was the case in Patna, and it was a process witnessed at first hand by D’Oyly. Like Prinsep, he came from an old East India Company family. D’Oyly had returned to India (where he was born) in 1797 and held a number of posts in Calcutta before moving to Patna in 1821 as Opium Agent. He was a prolific artist and published many books with engravings and lithographs from his drawings, including Indian Sports (1829) and Costumes of India (1830). He even imported a lithograph press to Patna which he ran with the help of local Indian artists. Amongst his many achievements was the formation of an art society in Patna in 1824. In this and other images of Patna, however, the crumbling mosques and great houses seem to reflect the city’s economic and political decline.
The career of Colonel Robert Smith (1787–1873) epitomised the way in which visual records were part and parcel of a wider British engagement with the Indian subcontinent. Like John Johnson (discussed in Chapter 1), Smith was a military engineer. But he was also an architect, an archaeologist and a painter. He served during the Nepal War in the early 1810s. Later in the decade, between 1816 and 1819, he spent time in Penang (in today’s Malaysia) in order to benefit from the healthier climate there. His views of the island were later published by William Daniell. Eventually, however, Smith returned to India where he was appointed garrison engineer at Delhi. As part of this role, he was responsible for the care of some of the city’s greatest ancient monuments. He was involved in the restoration of many of them and he also made extensive records of them in images. After his return to Europe, Smith put his knowledge of Mughal architecture to good, if eccentric, use by designing Indian-style palaces for himself in Nice and Paignton.
One of the most striking records left to us by Smith is his depiction of the fort known as the Purana Qila, where the crumbling edifice offers an imposing backdrop to the two passing elephants carrying their passengers (Fig. 3.26). This complex of buildings was begun by the Emperor Humayun in 1538, but it was completed by the Afghan chief Sher Shah Sur after his defeat of Humayun. Smith may have used a camera obscura in order to ensure the accuracy of his depiction – the crisp outlines of the buildings suggest this was the case. But it is in the surrounding detail that Smith furnishes a more complex rendition of the scene and provides a sophisticated comment on the history embodied in it. Ultimately Smith offers a musing on history, time and memory to viewers of the image. In another image of the fort, the layers of the building are exposed as being in different stages of stasis and transformation. Its pitted brick façade is a reminder of the passing of time and the futility of human ambition (Fig. 3.27). Meanwhile, however, an Indian soldier in the service of the British and situated close by emphasises the British presence in the city. This element, combined with Smith’s role as the garrison engineer and creator of this image, sets the British authorities up as both proprietors and narrators of India’s past. Here is the new economic, military and political power – Smith’s image seems to suggest – supplanting those that had gone before and represented in the ruins of faded empires that dotted the landscape.
Figure 3.27 Robert Smith, Inside the Main Entrance of the Purana Qila, Delhi, 1823 (YCBA, B1976.7.73)
SPECIAL SITES
Throughout this chapter, we have seen how European artists responded to Indian landscapes and the architectural elements they found there. While many places succeeded in exciting curiosity and enthusiasm, a few were particularly prized as sites for artistic recording and aesthetic engagement. Principal among these was the ‘Crown of the Palace’, the Taj Mahal. It was built by Emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his favourite wife, Arjumand Banu, called Mumtaz Mahal (‘Chosen of the Palace’). When she died in childbirth in 1631, Shah Jahan dedicated the next twenty years of his life to building a suitable memorial for her, eventually completing it in 1653. The grandest of Shah Jahan’s architectural projects, it is made of Makrana marble which possesses the most subtle variations of tone. In stylistic terms, the building unites two different architectural traditions as the large bulbous dome is of Persian origin, while the smaller cupolas are indigenous to India.
The Taj Mahal was long regarded as an iconic sight. Writing shortly after its completion, François Bernier immediately recognised it to be one of the wonders of the world. For him, this ‘splendid mausoleum is more worthy of a place among the wonders of the world than the misshapen masses and heaps of stones in Egypt’.24 Thomas Twining, over a century later, was equally enamoured. Although he was less impressed by Shah Jahan’s political record as a ruler, he praised him for having ‘left to India the most beautiful sepulchral monument the world possesses’:
The beauties of the Taje [sic] more than satisfy all expectation, and more than requite the fatigue and risks of the desert; they leave nothing to desire, to the traveller who beholds them, but the possibility of describing them. But though no pen can describe, and no pencil trace, the beauty of the Taje, its character may be conceived from an expression of the celebrated Zoffany – ‘It wanted nothing but a glass case to cover it.’25
Figure 3.28 William Hodges, A View of the Ruins at Agra and the Taj Mahal, 1783 (YCBA, B1978.43.1807)
As one of the most accomplished European artists to visit India in the eighteenth century, Johan Zoffany, quoted here by Twining, was well placed to comment on the building’s aesthetic and artistic qualities. Another artist who remarked on its iconic global status was Thomas Daniell:
The Taje Mahel [sic] has always been considered as the first example of Mahomedan architecture in India, and consequently, being a spectacle of the highest celebrity, is visited by persons of all rank, and from all parts. This high admiration is however not confined to the partial eye of the native Indian; it is beheld with no less wonder and delight by those who have seen the productions of art in various parts of the globe.26
In many ways, it was the work of travelling artists, like Daniell himself, that transformed the Taj into an instantly recognisable monument. When Henry Prinsep visited Agra in 1870, on a business trip from Western Australia, he was immediately impressed: ‘A description would give very little idea of its grandeur, situated as it is on the banks of the Jumna, asleep for ever in its large, dark, shadowy gardens.’27
William Hodges and the Daniells were among the earliest British artists to see the Taj Mahal, visiting it in the 1780s (Figs 3.28 and 3.29). Like many others, Hodges waxed lyrical in his description:
It possesses a degree of beauty, from the perfection of the materials and from the excellence of the workmanship, which is only surpassed by its grandeur, extent, and general magnificence. The basest material that enters into this center part of it is white marble, and the ornaments are of various coloured marbles, in which there is no glitter: the whole appears like a most perfect pearl on an azure ground. The effect is such as, I confess, I never experienced from any work of art. The fine materials, the beautiful forms, and the symmetry of the whole, with the judicious choice of situation, far surpasses anything I ever beheld.28
In the case of Hodges, however, he reinforced these words by a range of depictions of the scene that so impressed him. In one image, made for his Select Views in India, Hodges chooses an all-encompassing and panoramic view which presents the architectural grandeur of the entire scene at Agra (Fig. 3.30). It displays the intricate effects of light, water and atmosphere as Hodges viewed it in the low light of sunset. The foreground shows the river with Indians working on boats in silhouette on it. Agra Fort is reflected in the water with dramatic cloud formations looming behind it. Meanwhile, in the background, the Taj Mahal is displayed amid the brilliance of penetrating light, offering an elegant architectural contrast to the more robust outlines of the fort.
The Daniells reached Agra on 20 January 1789 and pitched their tents ‘immediately opposite the Taj Mahal’. They noted in their journal that they spent the entirety of their first day at the site sketching the famous mausoleum and visiting the tomb of Itimad-ud-Daula in the evening. They crossed the Jumna River the next morning and breakfasted with Major Palmer before sketching inside the Taj. Palmer was the British Resident to the Maratha chief Scindia, who controlled the whole area. The following day, 22 January, was also spent drawing the Taj, with Thomas outside in the garden and William focusing on the interior. In the evening, and much to his uncle’s consternation, William went up on the dome. They relaxed later by eating the ‘apples, pears & grapes of Persia from Major Palmer’s table’. The Daniells were similarly employed for the next two days.29
The Daniells’ time at Agra was explained in a booklet published in 1801 entitled Views of the Taje Mahel at the City of Agra in Hindoostan Taken in 1789. It contained two large coloured aquatints along with a descriptive letterpress, as well as a ground plan of the whole area, engraved by James Newtown, with detailed references to various parts of the building. The aquatints were huge. At some three feet across and two feet high, they were larger than those in Oriental Scenery. In one, a variety of river boats in the foreground provides a contrast to the monument which is reflected in water. Several Indian figures on the shore – some walking, others reclining and some traders with a camel and an elephant – add a sense of daily life and ordinary activity to the majesty of the scene. The second image (Fig. 3.31) shows the highly ornamental garden that so captivated Thomas:
The garden view of the Taj Mahal was taken immediately on entering it by the principal gate … whence the Mausoleum, being seen down an avenue of trees, has on first entering a most impressive effect on the spectator. The large marble bason [sic] in the centre of the garden with fountains, and those rising out of the watery channel with paved walks on each side, add to the variety and richness of the scene, and give to it that coolness which is so luxurious an improvement to an Oriental garden.30
The ornamental fountains play in a pool while Indian figures watch in the foreground as the monument in the middle ground is framed by rows of giant trees and tall thin minarets.
If the Taj Mahal presented a site of singular architectural interest to British travellers and artists, the entire city of Benares (today’s Varanasi) offered another site of iconic status. From the earliest days of European contact with the subcontinent, it had excited wonder and awe in those who saw it. The seventeenth-century traveller François Bernier called Benares ‘the Athens of India’.31 Several centuries later, William Sproston Caine thought that it was still ‘without question the most picturesque city in India’.32 When William Hodges exhibited a painting of the city at the Royal Academy in 1788, one reviewer compared Benares with Delft in the Netherlands (Fig. 3.32). But it was also a site where the religious complexity of India was laid bare. Temples, palaces and a monumental mosque jostled for attention. Unlike the calm serenity of the Taj Mahal, then, Benares presented the hustle and bustle of the subcontinent in the context of one of its most ancient and holiest settlements. William Hodges hastened to prepare ‘for observing with the utmost attention whatever came within the sphere of a painter’s notice’.33 Visitors encountered ‘a kaleidoscopic crowd’ where the number of Hindu ‘pilgrims from every part of India’ ensured ‘every variety of costume, and every stage of dress and undress, grouped under huge straw umbrellas, sitting at the feet of some learned preacher, gazing at holy ascetics, jostled by sacred bulls, crowded in and out of the water, drying themselves with towels, prostrate at the margin telling beads’.34 For Lady Charlotte Canning, the ‘great sight of all was’, simply, ‘Benares’. This was the only place where she had ‘really’ felt she had ‘seen India’ for ‘not a trace or touch of anything European exists there’.35 The Hindoos, a popular nineteenth-century guidebook, was equally enthusiastic:
Figure 3.30 William Hodges, A View of the Fort of Agra on the River Jumna from the Northeast, 1783 (YCBA, B1978.43.1802)
Figure 3.31 Thomas Daniell and William Daniel, ‘The Taje Mahel, Agra. Taken in the Garden’, Views of the Taje Mahel at the City of Agra in Hindoostan Taken in 1789, 1801 (P928)
Benares stands upon the northern bank of the Ganges, where the sinuosity of the sacred river forms a magnificent semicircle, of which its site occupies the external curve. The ground upon which it stands is considerably elevated, particularly towards the centre, from which point the rows of buildings descend in terraces, like the seats of an amphitheatre, to the water’s edge.
The whole city was ‘studded with innumerable pagan temples’ and ‘crowned by a lofty Mohammedan mosque’, which was ‘reflected with all its grandeur in the … face of the Ganges’.36
William Hodges’s depiction of the city captured the varied and irregular outlines of the buildings and tufted trees. And he enlivened the scene with the inclusion of details such as the figures and boats at the ghats. In addition to the pictorial composition, however, this sustained engagement with the architecture of the city betrays Hodges’s interest in its history and his belief in the power of visual depictions to convey more profound truths about the nature of human society and culture. He praised Benares as the ancient seat of Brahmin learning. It was, in his view, perhaps the oldest city in the world and a repository of living history. On his arrival there, he confessed his ‘real pleasure’ at the prospect of ‘being able to contemplate the pure Hindoo manners, arts, buildings, and customs’, the more so ‘since the same manners and customs prevail amongst these people at this day, as at the remotest period that can be traced in history’.37 Here was a site where the religious contest between Hindu and Muslim was thrown into sharp relief. Hodges perceived a conflict between what he regarded as the pure, spiritual values of Hinduism and the destructive influence of Islam. This was manifest in the contrast between the sacred Panchganga Ghat in the foreground and the imposing minarets of Aurangzeb’s mosque behind. Tradition had it that the seventeenth-century mosque towering over the Panchganga Ghat had been built on the site of an earlier Hindu temple. To this end, most Europeans interpreted its soaring grandeur as a sign of the city’s violent past when the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb had allegedly ordered that the Hindu temple be destroyed and replaced by a mosque. The emphasis on the mosque as a decrepit, obsolete relic draws attention to Aurangzeb’s fading legacy:
Nearly at the centre of the city is a considerable Mahomedan mosque, with two minarets: the height from the water to the top of the minarets is 232 feet. The building was raised by that most intolerant and ambitious of human beings, the Emperor Aurungzebe, who destroyed a magnificent temple of the Hindoos on this spot, and built the present mosque, of the same extent and height as the building he destroyed.38
Hodges reached Benares in August 1781 in the retinue of his patron, Warren Hastings. His studies of the city and its architecture were interrupted, however, by the infamous conflict between Hastings and Raja Chait Singh. As well as its more ancient history, Hodges’s view of the city was intimately connected, therefore, with the rise of the East India Company and its increasing political and military dominance in the subcontinent. For some time, Hastings had been attempting to extract additional money from Chait Singh, the Raja of Benares, over and above the dues paid to the Company under treaty arrangements. Chait Singh’s refusal to comply prompted the Governor-General to visit the city and to seek redress. The Raja was placed under arrest within his own palace. But his troops came to his aid, rescuing him and massacring the detachment of British sepoys detailed to guard him. As the Raja’s troops prepared to attack his small British force, Hastings and his men had to beat a hasty retreat. Hodges was among them, and he was forced to abandon ‘the whole of my baggage, excepting my drawings, and a few changes of linen’.39 Subsequently, British reinforcements were summoned and Chait Singh’s uprising was ruthlessly suppressed. By the end of September, Hastings’s party was able to return to Benares, and Hodges resumed his dispassionate investigation of the city’s antiquities. Quite apart from its importance in the artistic history of Britain’s involvement with India, then, this episode was one of the principal matters leading to Hastings’s impeachment in 1787.
In addition to his musings on the relative place of different religious traditions in the city, Hodges also offers some local detail to enliven and illuminate the scene. His grey wash, now in the collection at Yale, provides visual information about everyday life in the city (Fig. 3.33). Other travellers also revelled in the pictorial and picturesque details offered by the daily rhythms of the city. Captain Robert Elliott remarked on the ghats of the city:
The immense flight of steps called the Ghauts of Benares, form a great ornament to the river face of the city. … Crowds of people come down to wash in, and also to worship, the Ganges. … The gracefulness of many of the washing figures, the various colours of their dresses, the easy and elegant attitudes in which they stand, and the admirable groups into which they occasionally fall, would form excellent subjects for a painter.40
Emma Roberts was similarly stuck by the bustling energy around the ghats:
The ghauts are literally swarming with life at all hours of the day and every creek and jetty are crowded with craft of various descriptions, all truly picturesque in their form and effect. … No written description, however elaborate, can convey even a faint idea of the extraordinary peculiarities of a place which has no prototype in the East. … It is only by pictorial representations that any adequate notion can be formed of the mixture of the beautiful and the grotesque, which, piled confusedly together, form that stupendous wall which spreads along the bank of the Ganges at Benares.41
Visual representations of the city did not end with Hodges. Some of the most proficient drawings of Benares made in the early nineteenth century were done by the amateur artist James Prinsep of the Bengal Civil Service. James, like his brother William, had a penchant for making visual records. From 1820 to 1830, James was Assay Master at the Benares Mint. He published Benares Illustrated in a Series of Drawings in three parts between 1831 and 1834. A great scholar, deeply learned in Sanskrit texts, Prinsep came to know the city intimately during his time at Benares. His drawings depict not only the ghats, but also the tortuous alleyways of the city, the interiors of the houses, the architecture of temples and palaces, as well as the life of the city – priests reading the Puranas (ancient Hindu texts), crowds waiting for an eclipse of the moon and the great Ram Lila festival (Fig. 3.34). Later in the century, after the demise of the East India Company, the romance of Benares still attracted artists. Edward Lear was in India from November 1873 to January 1875. Yet his interest in Benares’s religious heritage was surely inspired by those who had been there before him. Despite initial difficulties, Lear eventually remarked on how ‘truly glad’ he was ‘to have seen this wonderful place’ (Fig. 3.35). His journal recorded how he spent his time sketching the ghats:
Got a boat, a large one, for no one can have the least idea of this Indian city’s splendour without this arrangement. Utterly wonderful is the rainbow-like edging of the water with thousands of bathers reflected in the river. Then the colours of the temples, the strangeness of the huge umbrella and the inexpressibly multitudinous detail of architecture, costume, etc. … How well I remember the views of Benares by Daniell RA; pallid, gray, sad, solemn. I had always supposed this place a melancholy, or at least a staid and soberly coloured spot, a gray record of bygone days. Instead I find it one of the most abundantly bruyant, and startlingly radiant places full of bustle and movement. Constantinople or Naples are simply dull and quiet by comparison.42
CONCLUSION
The landscapes of India were as varied as the European artistic responses to them. Some travellers sought the familiarity of home, seeking equivalence and comfort. Certain places, such as the European residences at Garden Reach or the Governor-General’s villa at Barrackpore, lent themselves to this kind of interpretation. But the irresistible attraction of India also made its mark on artists. In the representation of Indian landscape scenes, artists were inspired both by what lay before their eyes and by what they drew from their artistic heritage, training and background. Tensions necessarily existed: between the obvious artifice of the picturesque on the one hand, which rearranged or ‘improved’ subjects and scenes for the sake of both affect and effect, and the desire for truthfulness, accuracy and veracity on the other. Navigating between these two poles defined the distinctive European visual engagement with Indian landscapes in this period.
Landscape views of India were a constant feature of the British encounter with the subcontinent. In this, they reflected artistic tradition and taste back in Europe. But there was another major genre of visual representation that lent itself to describing and depicting the British engagement with India: portraiture. Writing to his friend, Ozias Humphry, the Calcutta-based amateur artist William Baillie lamented the fact that he was not taken serious as an artist in India. This was in spite of the fact that some of his views of the city had been very well received by the critics. Reluctantly, he came to the conclusion that he was wasting his time in ‘landscape painting which is unprofitable’. Instead, Baillie was going to try his hand at portrait painting: ‘There are but very few judges of a good picture – a likeness is what most people want, and I think I can promise that.’43
