A country on a canvas – Lifestyle News

By Faizal Khan

In the summer of 1931, renowned Japanese artist Hiroshi Yoshida arrived in India to extend his field of creativity to foreign lands. Following his visit, Yoshida created several works on India that drew the attention of art collectors in the West. One such was titled Moonlight of Taj Mahal. 

Exactly a year before, German artist Eric Kips boarded the passenger liner Resolute for a voyage around the world in five months. During a long halt in India, Kips roamed over the country, stopping among other places, at Agra and Varanasi. One of his works from the trip, an oil on ply board, was Taj Mahal.

Several decades earlier, Danish artist Hugo Vilfred Pedersen spent 12 years in India, sometimes working on portraits for the then maharajas. One of Pedersen’s works based on India was, The Taj Mahal, an oil on canvas.

While there are a few artworks on the Taj Mahal, one of the modern wonders of the world, at the new DAG exhibition, Destination India: Foreign Artists in India 1857-1947, the show stands out for some of the rare art by foreign artists that focused on common people and views from the street of a country under colonial rule.

Opened to the public on July 13 at the DAG gallery in the national capital, Destination India (July 13-August 24) has over 90 works by 40 artists from 12 countries acquired over a decade from Europe and the United States. “All these works have never been exhibited for the public before in India,” says DAG CEO and managing director Ashish Anand. 

“While considering foreign representations of India, the focus (so far) has remained on early pioneers—British artists such as the Daniells (William and uncle Thomas Daniell), William Hodges or George Chinnery who visited India in the late 18th and 19th centuries. These pioneers sought grand monuments and vast new landscapes with the aim to open Europe’s eyes to India’s great historic heritage,” explains Anand. 

“However, those who followed—the English artist William Simpson, the Dutch Marius Bauer, the Danish Huge Pederson, other Europeans such as Olin Ghilardi and Erich Kips, or from even further afield, such as Edwin Lord Weeks from America, and Hiroshi Yoshida from Japan—came with a different aesthetic sensibility and were much more interested in a living India: in the cultures or the daily route of an Indian bazaar or a haveli,” he adds.

One of the striking images of the exhibition is a watercolour, A Fruit Vendor, India, by British artist Carlton Alfred Smith, which shows two women selling fruits and vegetables. Smith, who studied at London’s Slate School of Fine Art, arrived in India in 1916 and went on to live in the country for seven years. A member of the Royal Academy of Art, his works like Street Scene, India and Bazaar Scene, India show working women and mothers, a focus also of his paintings of life in English countryside back home.

Dutch painter Bauer, who decided on Orientalism as the call of his profession after a visit to Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1886 at the age of 21, arrived in India in 1898, dashing to places like Mathura, Vrindavan, Ajmer, Baroda and Hyderabad during his four-months stay. Benares, an oil on canvas by Bauer, shows a man by the ghat under an evening sky staring into the vast expanse of the Ganges. 

English artist Charles William Bartlett, whose initial years were spent portraying the daily lives of women farm workers, visited India in 1913, bringing out a series of paintings, including one on the Taj Mahal. But his woodblock print on paper titled Jaunpur, which shows a man wearing a turban leading a camel on which a woman and child are sitting, along a river, and another of devotees at the Golden Temple in Amritsar and at a village temple in Kashmir evoke elements of a nation charting its own destiny.

The Corner of a Fruit Market, Delhi by Australian artist Mortimer Menpes, an oil and mixed media on cardboard from 1903, shows a cow and her calf in front of a vegetable shop. Another, a watercolour on paper also from the same year, has a bearded elderly man waiting for customers for a line of pots placed on top of each other. Italian painter Olinto Ghilardi, who taught artist Abanindranath Tagore while he was the vice-principal of the Government School of Art in the then Calcutta (now Kolkata), adds to the portrayal of common people with a 1896 pastel on paper titled, Head of a Young Woman, and another of an elderly man.

“The works by these foreign artists during the last nine decades of colonial rule identify a missing chapter of Indian history,” says Delhi-based art historian and author Giles Tillotson, the curator of Destination India. “The works represent a different approach than the artists who came to India before them. There is a modern sensibility in these artists who want to paint the street scenes,” adds Tillotson, senior vice-president (exhibitions) at DAG. Scottish artist William Simpson’s watercolours created between 1863 and 1867 echo the comments of Tillotson. Sent by his publisher to paint the 1857 mutiny, Simpson instead painted the lives of the common people, like a labourer walking with a load on his back in his 1865 painting, Large Deodar Tree, Kunawer, Himalayas. Says Tillotson, “Simpson was not interested in the big monuments.”

The author is a freelancer

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