Search results for: 'Pra na'

DAG invited leading historians of Delhi, Swapna Liddle and Rana Safvi, to explore our archives collection. The items they found there include numerous photographs of the three durbars, taken by prominent photographers of the day. They also include many other objects relating to the durbars, from portraits and medals, to maps and official guidebooks, and to tickets and programmes. Historians in the past have analysed the ideology of the Delhi durbars, but never before has such a collection of the material culture of these events been brought together for display.

The series of aquatint prints known as Oriental Scenery represent the single largest and most impressive project by English artists to depict Indian architecture and landscape. Thomas Daniell (1749-1840) and his nephew William Daniell (1769-1837) travelled extensively in India between 1786 and 1793. On their return to Britain they produced many paintings, drawings and prints based on the sketches they had made while travelling. The aquatints were issued in pairs between March 1795 and December 1808. Subscribers who purchased all of them could assemble them into six volumes, each with 24 prints, making up a total of 144 – of which half are shown here.

The idea of primitivism centres on the wish to identify with, or respond to, elements of a society that are deemed ‘primitive’. In artistic terms, it is about rejecting realism, simplifying technique and reducing the formal means of expression to a ‘primitive’ state. The term itself is borrowed from discussions of Western art, where high-profile examples include the images of Tahiti and its people made in the 1890s by Paul Gauguin, and responses to African sculpture by Pablo Picasso in 1906-09. The second thread of primitivism—the reduction of formal means—is best exemplified by the ‘cut-outs’ made by Henri Matisse in the 1940s.