Exhibition shows Indian life through eyes of Orientalist painters from 1857- 1947

New Delhi, Jul 31 (PTI) When English artist and poet Edward Lear went to see the Taj Mahal on February 16, 1874, his imagination was captured by “the dark green cypresses” and “the innumerable flights of bright green parrots flitting across like live emeralds”.

Lear’s romantic impression of the Taj was starkly different from his predecessors like British landscape painter William Hodges, who travelled to India nearly a century ago. Hodges’ journal entry described the marble mausoleum in its architectural finesse, lacking any romantic imagery.

This difference in representation of India in the eyes of Orientalist artists separated by a century is the central subject of an ongoing exhibition, “Destination India: Foreign Artist in India, 1857-1947”, at DAG here.

While the contemporaries of Hodges saw India through its landscapes, grand monuments and intricate architecture, those of Lear’s era sought the hubbub of Indian bazaars, the quiet evenings of its gardens, and the excited crowds of its ghats.

‘Destination India’ focuses on foreign artists who travelled to India from across the world – Germany, Holland, Denmark, France, America, Japan, besides Britain – between the Uprising of 1857 and Independence in 1947 as examples of a late phase of the Orientalist art.

With a refreshing and essential turn in the representation of India, the exhibition delves into a less-explored but equally compelling period: “the late 19th and early 20th centuries to explore the intricate perspectives of a new generation of artists who found different nuances and beauty in the Indian subcontinent.

Curated by Giles Tillotson, the show uncovers a forgotten archive of painters and printmakers in a fast changing colonial India and focuses on this later period of foreign paintings in India.

Starting with Lear, who toured India for over a year between November 1873 and January 1875, the Orientalist artists who came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in their exploration of a “living India”, included William Simpson, Olinto Ghilardi, Marius Bauer, Erich Kips, Hugo Pederson, Edwin Lord Weeks, and Hiroshi Yoshida.

“They’re giving you a different view of India from what we’ve seen from foreign artists before. You’re too late if you’re coming in the late 19th century, it’s too late to show people what the Taj Mahal looks like because everybody already knows. By then it’s become a cliche.

“So you’ve got to find a new way of showing it or a new angle and one of the new angles you see and a lot of these works is an engagement very much with Indian life as it is lived out on the streets, in marketplaces, at places of worship,” Tillotson told PTI.

The selection of works, seen through the eyes of nearly 40 artists from different countries, investigates the perspective of the European artist that was influenced by ideas of romanticism, marred by prejudice, but also an important one to understand the shaping of Indian visual culture.

“It’s a slightly romanticised, slightly idealised, exoticised vision of India that goes without saying. We’re talking about a European vision of India in the colonial era. But if you can peep through the mist of orientalism, you can see Indian life being lived for real on the streets in some of these images,” the curator said.

The accompanying book, with a foreword by Shashi Tharoor and essays by historians Pheroza Godrej and Tillotson, delves deeper into the representation of India through the eyes of British and other European artists.

The exhibition will come to a close on August 24.