Destination India: Foreign Artists in India 1857–1947

This exhibition looks at the work of foreign artists who visited India between the Uprising (1857) and Independence (1947) as examples of a late phase of Orientalist art. The famous landscape painters of a much earlier era, such as William Hodges and Thomas and William Daniell, had clearly defined goals: they came in search of picturesque views of architecture and landscape. The artists who came later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were more diverse in every way. They were more interested in people and society, and scenes of everyday life, than in monuments; they were stylistically varied; and they came from many countries, including Germany, Holland, Denmark, France and even Japan, besides Britain.

They brought to India a fresh aesthetic sensibility. Earlier artists had come with the purpose of opening Europe’s eyes to India’s historic cultures. For Hodges and the Daniells even the Taj Mahal was relatively unknown, as no one had previously depicted it. By the late nineteenth century, travel and tourism had made it a cliché, and new ways of depicting it had to be found. The same goes for the ghats at Benares, and every other well-known site. To these were added new destinations, like the temples and forts of Rajasthan, and the gardens of Kashmir. In this selection of works, we encounter a host of people and places of India, as seen through the eyes of artists who were foreigners, but who were intent on a more personal and intimate engagement.

Marius Bauer

The Dutch painter, draughtsman, etcher and lithographer Marius Alexander Jacques Bauer emerged as the greatest Orientalist painter from the Netherlands. He developed an interest in foreign cultures at an early age, having read many Orientalist writings. He first travelled to India in 1898 and returned for a year in 1924. On his maiden visit, he was unimpressed with modern European architecture in cities like Bombay, as he possessed a predilection for the ‘unspoilt East’, but he became enamoured with Benares, Jaipur, Udaipur, Gwalior, Ajmer, Palitana and Mathura, which he thought constituted the ‘real’ India with its ancient architecture, bustling streets and a thriving ‘Eastern’ culture.

Bauer made sketches and drawings on site and later developed them into etchings, watercolours and paintings. His oriental imagery is a mix of his travel memories and fantasy, born partly out of what he called ‘postdreaming’ about the East.

Charles William Bartlett

The English artist Charles William Bartlett was one of the world’s finest Japanese ukiyo-e style woodblock printmakers in the world. In 1913, Bartlett travelled to Asia, visiting India, Indonesia and China. In 1915, he went to Japan, where he happened to meet woodblock print publisher Shozaburo Watanabe, the driving force behind the Shin Hanga (New Prints) movement during the turn of the twentieth century. Bartlett showed a selection of watercolour sketches from his travels, which Watanabe proposed developing into woodblock prints, but first he had Bartlett convert the pencil-based designs to Japanese brush and ink paintings in order to facilitate the block carving process.

Thus began a long-term collaboration between Bartlett and Watanabe, and Bartlett became one of the first artists to work with the publisher. He designed a total of thirty-eight woodblock prints for Watanabe from 1916 to 1925—some of the finest prints of this generation. The first series consisted of six Indian scenes plus a cover print of the Taj Mahal, followed by a series of six Japanese scenes. Many of Bartlett’s prints and etchings were scenes from his travels through South Asia, China and, later, Hawaii. The Indian scene series was put on display in an exhibition at the gallery of the Berlin Photographic Company in New York.

Hugo Vilfred Pedersen

Danish artist Hugo Vilfred Pedersen spent about twenty years travelling through Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, making copious paintings of the sights he saw and portraits of important personages he met. Pedersen especially sought out ordinary people, painting portraits of liveried servants, guards and people from diverse professions. Pedersen also painted a portrait of India’s viceroy of the time, Lord Curzon, in 1903, which attests to his presence at the Delhi Durbar the same year.

Pedersen was a representative of the traditional European school of painting, and his works reflected the style, almost carrying a sense of a narrative in them. He spent many years drawing temples and forts in various parts of India and the local people he encountered during his travels across the subcontinent.