Two-month exhibition to show how foreign artists saw India between 1857 and 1947

So how did the world get to see India in an age when travel magazines were rare and when social media was unthinkable and when India wasn’t even an independent nation? Mostly through the works of artists — and later photographers — who travelled to the subcontinent.

A two-month long exhibition at the Alipore Museum in Kolkata will bring back to life that India by showcasing works of close to 40 foreign artists who spent time in India in the period between two important moments in its history, the 1857 Mutiny and Independence.

Titled Destination India: Foreign Artists in India, the exhibition, to be held from February 28 to May 2, is being organised by the art company DAG in collaboration with the museum. It focuses on artists who travelled to India from Germany, Holland, Denmark, France, America, Japan, besides Britain.

“When considering British and other European representations of India, the focus is often on the pioneers. The problem with this traditional trajectory is that it overlooks the many interesting artists who visited India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries… They came to India with a different aesthetic sensibility and with different interests. In their works, we find an India — if we can put it this way — that we do not just see but that we can hear and smell,” said Ashish Anand, CEO and MD of DAG.

Giles Tillotson, curator of the show and senior vice-president of DAG, told The Hindu that the exhibition was important today because it pointed at two gaps in art understanding of that period.

“One, it’s often been supposed that foreign artists visiting India to paint images or produce prints is something that dried up or came to an end with the invention of photography, that from the middle of the 19th century, when photography was available, the camera became the principal medium for representing Indian scenery. This collection of works shows that that just isn’t true. Yes, we had some wonderful photographers, but painters continued to come in substantial numbers, and that hadn’t really been noticed before,” Dr. Tillotson said.

The second gap, according to him, was the belief that orientalist art was just representations of North Africa and West Asia by European artists in the late 19th and early 20th century. “It was always supposed that they stuck around the Middle East, that they didn’t really get as far as India. Again, not true. Here they are. So it’s really about setting the record straight in terms of two prevalent, traditional art historical narratives, to kind of correct those two ideas,” the curator said.

While the artists who visited India in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries captured mostly grand monuments and vast landscapes, those who came later—whether, British, German, Dutch, Danish, American or Japanese, offered intimate glimpses of street life.

Artists whose works will be on display include Edward Lear, William Carpent​er, Marius Bauer, Hugo Vilfred Pedersen, Olinto Ghilardi, Roderick Dempster MacKenzie, Mortimer Menpes, Maurice Levis, John Gleich, W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp, Yoshida Hiroshi, Boris Georgiev and Holger Hvitfeldt Jerichau.

“Serving as a reminder that the advent of new technology did not put an end to older forms of artistic production but encouraged artists into new directions, the exhibition brings artwork back and on display in the subcontinent, many of them almost a century after they were made, while investigating the perspective of the European artist, that was undoubtedly influenced by ideas of romanticism, marred by prejudice, but was an important one, if one is to understand the shaping of Indian visual culture.” Dr. Tillotson said.