The Indian Picturesque

‘Picturesque’ is a word that carries widely differing meanings. Its use in everyday speech is far removed from the specialist meaning intended by the aesthetic theorists who coined it in the 1790s. Literally meaning ‘like a picture’, it is obviously open to a range of interpretations. But the original theorists didn’t mean like any picture. Their vision was one of architecture and 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 saw this tendency 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 past 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 development in the mid-nineteenth (and beyond). In recent decades, the picturesque has some under scrutiny in academic circles, as many specialists have pointed out that the 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 practice of the picturesque in India.

The picturesque was brought to India by pioneering artists like William Hodges and Thomas and William Daniell, whose works have been the subject of previous DAG exhibitions. Here we focus on those who came later, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and who sustained and developed their image of India.

The colonising agenda of the picturesque has not done anything to diminish its wide appeal to general audiences, including here in India. Our love of landscape always contains an element of nostalgia. We prefer to think of landscape without 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 given to us by British artists of the past is a bit unrealistic – or, to misuse another common aesthetic term, ‘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. The fact that Company artists of the Murshidabad and Thanjavur schools were able to assimilate the picturesque must question the idea of it as an instrument of colonial control. Indeed, this exhibition is the first to display British and Indian landscape paintings of the early nineteenth century together, and to explore their interconnections.

Even if the word ‘picturesque’ has become a cliché over time, we hope that this selection of works from the DAG collection, will infuse it with fresh meaning, and present a vision of India which will inspire both thought and pleasure.