View on the Chitpore Road, Calcutta

The English artists Thomas Daniell and his nephew William Daniell, toured India in the 1700s to document various parts of the country. These ‘views’ were later reproduced in their book of paintings called Oriental Scenery: One Hundred and Fifty Views of the Architecture, Antiquities, and Landscape Scenery of Hindoostan. The house of a Bengali merchant at Chitpore, an indigenous marketplace in north Calcutta, intrigued Thomas Daniell because of its mixed style of architecture. According to Daniell, it combined Islamic ornamentation with a turret that was ‘an unsuccessful attempt at the Grecian’. While people go about their business on the streets, grey clouds rise in the blue skies almost in anticipation of a heavy downpour.