A Behaleea

Antwerp-born marine artist F. B. Solvyns’s great contribution was a monumental documentation of the people of eastern India in a series of 288 coloured etchings published by him in four volumes in the early nineteenth century following a long stretch in India where he had lived among the people he depicted. For most people in Europe, this was their first glimpse of Indian people other than the elite of the portrait painters whose paintings were never published as prints.