The Foreign Angle

Dancing Girl, an oil painting by Edwin Weeks can hold viewers in a trance. The American artist, one of the most successful Orientalist painters, studied under the leading French Orientalist Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris, and subsequently made four trips to India during the 1880s. The painting is remarkable in its detailing—the silhouette of a figure peering from the marble jaali windows is spectacular and each of the elements of the painting, including the costumes of the figures, the architectural detail, and the exactness of the colours used to show the building, are extraordinary in their representation. Giles Tillotson, senior VP (Exhibitions), DAG, says that he has seen people gasp looking at this image.

But look closely and you will find something amiss, Tillotson points out: “While the painting is so accurate in its documentation, and while the architecture is well observed, the juxtaposition is wrong.” He adds: “Weeks, much like the other artists of his time, uses photography as source material to get the detailing correct. But he creates his own narrative and ideas.” The setting of this painting is in Nizamuddin Auliya Dargah where, as Tillotson points out, it would have been impossible for a dancing girl to perform within its premises.

There is another painting, Dutch artist Marius Bauer’s Courtyard of a Palace, India (Humayun’s Tomb), which shows a knight in shining armour walking down the steps of a monument. Compared to other figures in the painting, the ‘knight’ looks out of place. “Like Weeks, Bauer, too, got the detailing correct with the help of photographs, making sketches and notes as he travelled. However, he was not above rearranging elements for better effect when it came to a finished work,” explains Tillotson, who has curated Destination India: Foreign Artists in India (1857-1947), an
important exhibition that for one of the very first times, in the history of Indian modern art, documents the contribution of foreign artists from the US, Europe, Australia, and Japan, between 1857 and 1947.

According to the CEO and MD of DAG Ashish Anand, the exhibition’s relevance lies in using historical evidence to show that the early 19th century was not only about photography’s advent in India but also about India’s own component of Orientalist painting, about which so little was known till DAG curated this show. In exploring this aspect of overlooked history, DAG, one of the premier art companies of India with a presence in Delhi, Mumbai, and New York, tells viewers a bigger story from the point of view of important artists many of whom, till recently, had been neglected.

By focussing on the period between 1857 and 1947, Destination India, uncovers a forgotten archive of painters and printmakers, especially in a period when photography had become the dominant medium of documentation. It is worth noting that until this exhibition was launched, most other shows only documented the contribution of several European and other travelling artists in the Middle East regions, including places such as Cairo, Morocco, Syria and Algeria. Noted art historian Pheroza Godrej, in her essay in the accompanying catalogue writes, “Destination India reminds us that the advent of new technology [photography] did not put an end to older forms of artistic production but encouraged artists into new directions. This show brings artwork back and on display in the subcontinent, many of them almost a century after they were made.”

Two years in the making, the exhibition’s positive response was expected especially given that it aims to show that India served as a ‘lure’ for Orientalist artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tillotson’s essay makes a point of looking at significant exhibitions such as Tate Gallery’s The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, (2008) which demonstrates Orientalism’s enduring appeal but fails to mention India. Another landmark exhibition, India Observed: India as Viewed by British Artists: 1760-1860, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as part of Britain’s Festival of India in 1982, focussed more on photography with just a stray mention of some painters. Ditto with yet another exhibition, held a few years later: Titled Merchants to Emperors: British Artists and India: 1757-1930, it was held at Pierpont Morgan Library in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986. Here, too, the focus was on photography and not on the artists who came to India between the 1850s and 1940s.

While DAG clarifies that there has been enormous—and much-needed—growth in scholarship of photography, it strongly feels that documentation of these artists will give a fuller glimpse of the art history of India by piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of the time. This is critical given that several experts wrongly presumed that none of the paintings emerging at the time of India by foreign artists deserved acclaim.

According to Tillotson, while many of the painters—whose works are in DAG’s exhibition—were already well known in their circles, their names gradually disappeared because no one pieced together this part of the history. Additionally, many of the works by these artists had to be collected over time, from all over the world. Tillotson, who had not heard of Maurice Baeur, Kips, and Pederson, came across some of the richly done paintings by these artists in DAG’s inventory. Gradually, he and his team started piecing together the history, joining the dots, and finding immense wonder at the quality of these works.

The experts in DAG found that compared to the first set of travelling artists who came to India 1780s onwards, many of the artists featured in the exhibition who came almost a century or two later, looked at Indian villages, towns, and cities from a very different lens. In his foreword in the exhibition’s catalogue, MP Shashi Tharoor writes: “Two contrasting depictions of the Taj Mahal, as seen by Edward Lear in 1874 and William Hodges a century earlier in 1783, encapsulates a transformative era. The former, filled with vivid colours and human touch, contrasts with the latter’s austere mathematical precision and architectural focus.”

“Destination India brings artwork back and on display in the subcontinent, many of them almost a century after they were made,” says Pheroza Godrej

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Hodges was the very first professional British landscape painter to visit the Taj Mahal (he called it Taje Mahal) and write about its architectural beauty in detail in his travelogue. A century later, Edward Lear, who came to India in the 1840s, dismissed the architecture, preferring to instead focus on the more personal sights and scenes that he could see from his perspective. In the case of the Taj, for instance, Lear’s artistic vision goes to the ‘scene of pilgrim washing’ that lies on the riverbank below the iconic, ivory-coloured monument. Unlike Hodges, Lear’s account of the Taj Mahal is focussed on the ‘gorgeously dressed and be-ringed women’. Ditto with many of these artists documenting other places such as Banaras, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Udaipur, and Delhi, among several others—from crowds of people filling up the ghats of Banaras to a busy street in Delhi to people sitting meditatively near the Udaipur Lake, the focus moves from pure architectural forms to more personal experiences. In doing so, the artists are also recording history, capturing the ravaged ruins and sites of ‘mutiny cities’ such as Lucknow, Cawnpore (Kanpur), Delhi, while also discovering newer places of tourist interest such as temples, gardens, and lesser known monuments in destinations such as Kashmir, Udaipur, Amritsar, and places in south India. What’s more, artists such as Hiroshi Yoshida from Japan, whose works can be seen at the exhibition, experimented with printmaking to visually present India.

According to Anand, DAG has already looked at the contribution of the pioneers via exhibitions done in the past: those artists, including Hodges, William Daniell, Balthazar Solvyns and Thomas, visited India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to discover India through their art. In bringing Destination India to art patrons and scholars, DAG fills the much-needed gap and breaks the longstanding views that painters, including few professionally trained female artists or “British ladies” as they were called, were not up to the mark when photography came up in the early nineteenth century in India. “On the contrary,” as Anand explains, “These were conventional artists who worked (sometimes with photography acting as a supporting role) in oil, watercolour, and various print techniques, much like the earlier pioneers.”

Given its significance, the exhibition will travel to Mumbai in March 2025.

(Destination India: Foreign Artists in India (1857-1947) is on view at DAG, Delhi, till August 24)

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Abhilasha Ojha

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