Glimpses of colonial India at Alipore Museum artwork show

Kolkata: An exhibition of works by foreign artists who travelled to India between the Uprising of 1857 and the Independence in 1947 will be inaugurated at the Alipore Museum on Feb 28, showcasing a late phase of Orientalist art that offered more intimate glimpses of Indian life, often at street level, unlike artists in the late 18th and early 19th centuries who sought grand monuments and vast landscapes. The exhibition will continue until May 2.Titled Destination India, the exhibition by DAG will feature artists from Germany, Holland, Denmark, France, America and Japan, besides Britain. It presented painters and printmakers working in a fast-changing India, when images were transmitted as picture postcards from 1880 onwards and photography became the dominant medium of documentation.
The exhibition will include works by Edward Lear, who toured India for over a year between Nov 1873 and Jan 1875. Other Orientalist artists whose works will feature in the exhibition include William Simpson, Olinto Ghilardi, Marius Bauer, Erich Kips and Hugo Pederson. It will also include artists from further afield, such as Edwin Lord Weeks from America and Hiroshi Yoshida from Japan. "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—from England and from other European countries—in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These were conventional artists working in oil and watercolour, and various print media, like the earlier pioneers. Some—like Mortimer Menpes and Walter Crane—produced illustrated books, just as James Prinsep and Robert Grindlay did almost a century earlier. 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 DAG chief executive officer and MD Ashish Anand. "Destination India reveals a personal and intimate engagement with India—a tapestry of people and places seen through the eyes of those who found both beauty and meaning in the country's cultural and social fabric during a time of profound change," said Alipore Museum director Jayanta Sengupta.