‘Picturesque’ is a word that carries widely differing meanings to different people. Its use in everyday speech is far removed from the specialised meanings understood by present-day scholars, or by the aesthetic theorists who first coined it in the 1790s. The latter are largely to blame for this confusion: the word literally just means ‘like a picture’, so they came up with a term that was obviously open to a range of interpretations. In fact, they meant something rather specific. They didn’t mean like any picture. To its original theorists, the picturesque was a vision of architecture in a landscape, the two forming inseparable parts of an organic whole, which appeared natural, or even casual, while at the same time being carefully, artificially harmonised. They observed this tendency already present in some landscape paintings of their own time and codified it for the future guidance of artists, architects and landscape gardeners.
Art historians of the mid-twentieth century saw the picturesque as Britain’s greatest contribution to Western aesthetics. It was the spirit that founded the English landscape school in the mid-eighteenth century and guided it through its expansion and development in the mid-nineteenth (and beyond). In recent decades, the picturesque has come under close scrutiny in academic circles, as many specialists have pointed out that the time period in which it flourished coincided with Britain’s colonial expansion. With its focus on land, the picturesque has been seen as an expression—indeed as an agent of—territorial control. Nowhere is this more evident than in the practise of the picturesque in India.
None of this has done anything to diminish its wide appeal to general audiences, including in India. Our love of landscape always contains an element of nostalgia. Most of us prefer to think of landscape cleansed of the ugly accretions of modernism, such as motorways and metro lines, skyscrapers and traffic signs. So even if we suspect that the view of India handed down to us by British artists of the past is a bit unrealistic—or, to misuse another aesthetic term that is now in general use, ‘romanticised’—we are inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Their sanitised depictions of India’s past accord with our own preferences for the less crowded, unspoilt corners of the country. Besides, Indian artists also adopted the picturesque, as the DAG collection clearly shows. Indeed, this exhibition is the first to display British and Indian landscape paintings of the early nineteenth century together, and to explore their interconnections.
The fact that Indian artists—especially Company artists of the Murshidabad school, and some in southern India—were ready and willing to assimilate the picturesque must question, or complicate, even if it doesn’t rebut, the idea that it was an instrument of colonial control. Both sides of that taxing question are explored in the chapters of this book. Giles Tillotson (SVP at DAG) presents a survey of the period from around 1800 to the middle of the century, looking at the work of those artists who came after pioneers like William Hodges and Thomas Daniell. Some of these later artists imitated the Daniells’ commercially successful large aquatint format, while others developed the picturesque in new ways, replacing their grand vistas with a more intimate encounter with rural India. Indian artists contributed to this process, as Sonal Singh (Assistant Professor at Motilal Nehru College, Delhi) explores in greater detail. Tom Young (Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, London) scrutinises the informal networks of amateur artists in colonial India, to show how amateurs contributed hugely to artistic production in this period, and again drew Indian practitioners into their circles.
Even if the word ‘picturesque’ has become a hackneyed cliché over time, these chapters, and the selection of works from DAG’s collection, infuse it with fresh meaning, and give us a vision of India which, we hope, will inspire both thought and pleasure.
