Dandys

B. Solvyns’s Dandys, far from referring to men about town, was a depiction of boatmen in eastern India, the region where he spent the better part of his time in India in the late eighteenth century documenting the people of the region. While most Western artists preferred more elite commissions, Solvyns, who had practically sneaked into the country without the sanction of the officials of the East India Company, found himself living amidst a more subordinate group of people whose lives and trades he documented in his monumental Les Hindous.