India between 1857 and 1947: How many different ways can you paint the Taj Mahal in Agra?

Danish artist Hugo Vilfred Pedersen's 'The Taj Mahal' (23 x 35-inch oil-on-canvas). (Image courtesy DAG)

Taj Mahal, that eternal monument of love, is one of the seven wonders of the world for a reason. Travellers have flocked to the gorgeous site of Mumtaz Mahal's burial ever since it was completed around 380 years ago. Indeed, the Europeans who came to India in the 18th century couldn't get enough of it.

British landscape painter William Hodges who came to Agra in February 1783 was deeply impressed by its "beauty", "perfection of the materials" and "the excellence of workmanship". And Thomas Daniell and William Daniell's 1801 work 'The Taje Mahal, Agra' is all about its gorgeous symmetry and intricate detailing.

Samuel Bourne, of Bourne & Shepherd in Shimla and later Calcutta (Kolkata), who travelled through India from 1863 to 1871 was mesmerized by the Taj. He wrote in the 'British Journal of Photography': "The world knows not another building to be compared with the Taj. It rises in its queenly beauty on the banks of the Jumna, and the eye that has once gazed on its snowy whiteness and dazzling splendour can never forget it."

Samuel Bourne - Taj Mahal at Agra in India. (Image source: Leiden University Library via Wikimedia Commons)

Bourne's photos of the Taj Mahal are now in museum collections around the world, including one titled 'The Taj, from the Garden, Agra' that is now part of the Victoria & Albert Museum collection. Yet even within Samuel Bourne's pictures of the monument of "dazzling splendour", a change started to become apparent in the second half of the 19th century.

Taj Mahal from across the Yamuna river, shot by Samuel Bourne in the 1860s. (Image credit: Rijksmuseum via Wikimedia Commons 1.0)

Prints and paintings of the Taj Mahal from a very specific period in Oriental art, are part of an ongoing art show called 'Destination India' at DAG Delhi. And while photos, including Bourne's albumen silver prints, are not part of the exhibition, they cast their shadow on it as part of the reason why some of these paintings have not been shown more widely before - the advances in photography and some of the results at this time have often overshadowed interest in other mediums and works.

Representations of India

"The east doesn't end at Damascus, it starts there," art historian Giles Tillotson told a group of some 60-odd people gathered at the DAG art gallery in Delhi on a rainy Saturday morning in July for an exhibition walkthrough.

Tillotson was setting the context for the art show titled 'Destination India | Foreign Artists in India: 1857 - 1947' at DAG, built around Orientalist painters who came to India between 1857 and 1947. He was also remarking on oversights in past exhibitions, where curators limited their definition of the east to only as far as Syria.

In a different part of the country, another exhibition-cum-auction is revisiting an overlapping period in Indian history. The art show-cum-auction by SaffronArt Mumbai is titled 'Passages to India: A Journey Through Rare Books, Prints, Maps, Photographs, and Letters', and the articles in it are available to see at the Mumbai SaffronArt gallery till July 25.

Indeed as India approaches its 78th Independence Day, it's interesting to think back to India during colonial times. These exhibitions in Delhi and Mumbai, respectively, offer a different perspective to view it through.

'Benaras at the Golden Gate' by Eric Kipps, oil on cardboard, 19.7 x 13.7 inches.

A piece of history: Mahatma Gandhi's letters, first edition of the Constitution, artworks

A first-edition copy of the Constitution is among 93 lots going under the hammer at SaffronArt from July 24-25. A piece of history, the 1950 edition is in august company, with other lots in the auction including letters penned by MK Gandhi and a signed copy of 'The Discovery of India'.

Signed copy of Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India in the SaffronArt auction (Image courtesy SaffronArt)

The pieces up for auction also include a 1795 hand-coloured aquatint plate by British artist Thomas Daniell. Daniell's work, titled 'The Chalees Satoon in the Fort of Allahabad on the River Jumna, predates the paintings and prints in 'Destination India' by at least 60 years. Indeed, a lot changed over these six decades.

Daniells - Thomas and his nephew William - came up in Tillotson's art walkthrough at DAG Delhi too. He explained that when Thomas Daniells was in India by special permission from the East India Company (EIC), the Company was still in-charge on the ground. (The transfer of power to the British crown occurred after 1857.) People in Europe were still largely unexposed to Indian art, architecture and culture. As such, Daniells tried to commit monuments to paper with great fidelity as well as great skill.

Thomas Daniell's 'The Chalees Satoon in the Fort of Allahabad on the River Jumna, July 1795'.

This would evolve such that by the mid-19th, early-20th century, artists had started to take greater creative licence, sometimes merging details from different place or weaving in elements of fantasy. Some of these artists and their artworks are represented in the ongoing 'Destination India' art show at DAG Delhi.

Destination India: Painting India in the age of photography

By the time American painter Edwin Lord Weeks came to India, in 1882-83 and then again in 1886 and 1892, photography had become an established—if still expensive—practice around the world. Throughout his travels in India—through much of Rajasthan, Mathura, Benares (Varanasi now), Agra, Delhi, Amritsar, Lahore, and Bombay (now Mumbai)—Weeks took photos of people in the streets, at monuments of interest and in the bazaars. These photographs helped him to accurately capture details—both architectural and human. The fashions of the day, the cultural practices, the places of commerce, anywhere that life bustled in all its 19th-century Indianness, Weeks seemed keen to document it on film as photo notes for his oil paintings.

Weeks is one of 37 foreigners whose art dating back to 1857 - 1947 is on display at the "Destination India | Foreign Artists in India: 1857 - 1947" art exhibition at DAG Delhi, till August 17.

Native Gharry or Cart in Ahmedabad by Edwin Lord Weeks, oil on canvas, 1882, 20.2 x 30.2 inches. (Image courtesy DAG)

Westerners had been coming to India for well over 300 years by the time of the first war of Independence in 1857. Each wave of travellers captured their impressions of India in their writings, paintings, prints and finally photos. So, what did European artists travelling to India between 1857 and Indian Independence in 1947 see and record, and in which media? What did they seek out? Which cities did they travel to? Art critic Gilles Tillotson addressed some of these questions in his exhibition walkthrough.

Take the case of Edwin Lord Weeks, the American Orientalist used advances in photography, often taking pictures as notes for his oil paintings. "If you look at his paintings, the details of the costumes, the features are all correct," explains Tillotson. But the photo notes notwithstanding, Weeks wasn't just interesting in reproducing what he saw on his travels. Instead, there seems to be a conscious shift away from the literal in his paintings, towards capturing the spirit of the Orient as he saw it.

Weeks' 'Dancing Girl' is a case in point: Now in the collection of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), the 28.9 x 39.8-inch oil-on-canvas painting depicts a "nautch girl" in the yard of a dargah. The improbable scene was of course manufactured on canvas, for a Western audience that would not likely recognize the place or the incongruence of it all. (This work is also on show at the 'Destination India' exhibition.)

Weeks is not the only foreigner painter of this time to represent their own idea of India on canvas thus. Indeed, he is part of an interesting set of artists who came to India from Europe, America, Australia, Japan, at the turn of the 19th century with brush in hand.

Marius Bauer, a Dutch artist, is heavily represented in the 'Destination India' show. Bauer travelled through India in 1898 and then again in 1924, visiting Bombay, Benaras, Agra, Gwalior, Mathura, Deeg, Bharatpur, Vrindavan, Delhi, Jaipur, Udaipur, Ajmer, Patiala, Baroda and Hyderabad. His works introduce dream-like elements into what look like realistic paintings. His itinerary also shows how, at the turn of the 19th century, Europeans coming to India were venturing out of the bigger cities.

The Palace at Udeypur by Marius Bauer, Watercolour on Whatman watercolour board, 1926, 16.7 x 15.2 inches.

How many different ways can you depict the Taj Mahal

To be sure, many of the artists who came to India at the turn of the 20th century and all the way up to Indian independence continued to paint the Taj. But how they depicted it changed over the decades. Some of these works are included in the DAG show.

Destination India: Perspectives on Taj Mahal and beyond

Over the decades, as the West became more familiar with images of the marble mausoleum, artists began to explore and depict other aspects of the Taj Mahal. The 'Destination India | Foreign Artists in India: 1857 - 1947' exhibition, at the DAG Delhi art gallery, captures this shift in perspective between the first war of Independence in 1857 and India's independence from British rule in 1947. It also shines a light on paintings and prints made by foreign artists in India, at a time when photography was on the rise.

Among the artworks in the 'Destination India' exhibition that is on till August 17, for instance, is Danish artist Hugo Vilfred Pedersen's 'The Taj Mahal' that captures a view of the Taj Mahal from a lookout point during daytime. The glimmering Taj in the distance takes up about a sixth of the 23 x 35-inch oil-on-canvas painting. In the companion text to 'Destination India', Aditi Mazumdar explains that Pedersen—"nicknamed the 'Rajah painter'" for his portraits of royals—came to India towards the end of the 19th century and was here during the Delhi Durbar of 1903.

Pedersen painted the Taj Mahal at least once more. Titled "The Taj Mahal by the Moonlight", the 23.5 x 35.5-inch painting moves a bit closer to the actual structure, but still depicts it through the manicured gardens that surround it. This painting finds place in the accompanying book to the art show 'Destination India'.

Japanese print maker Hiroshi Yoshida's 'Tsukiyo no Taji Maharu' (Moonlight of Taj Mahal) Shin Hanga print is another great example. Yoshida travelled to India even later than Pedersen, spending around four months touring India and South-East Asia in 1930. Deeply interested in capturing the light at different times of day, Yoshida depicted the Taj Mahal front and centre in the bluish colours of a moonlit night in this Kokka woodblock print from 1931 - the print is also on show at DAG Delhi currently.

Of course, moonlit nights at the gleaming white Taj are the stuff of legend. In his 1931 Kokka woodblock print, Yoshida fills the frame with the Taj Mahal. In the courtyard, we see three ladies, their heads covered. The view is so tightly cropped that the only hint we get of the majestic gardens surrounding the Taj comes through the shadow of a massive treetop on the floor.

In between Pedersen's 1903 visit to India and Yoshida's 1930 trip, British artist Charles William Bartlett travelled to Asia - including India, Indonesia and China - in 1913. His 1916 Kokka woodblock print titled 'Taj Mahal' (10.5x15 inch) studies the monument from across the river - its unbelievably clean waters reflecting the Taj as a lone boatman sits on the bank.

Bartlett's 1919 print 'Taj Mahal at Sunset' (15.5 x 10.7 inches) depicts the monument from closer quarters, from the gardens. This print, too, is part of the 'Destination India' show.

It's one thing to see a monument or a street / bazaar scene we're all familiar with in India, and quite another to see it mediated through the eyes and experience of people from a different time and a different place. The pieces in the SaffronArt auction as well as the works in the 'Destination India' exhibition offer more curated perspectives on India in colonial times.