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Lot Essay
The official artist on Flinders' circumnavigation of Australia in 1801-03, Westall, disappointed with the scenery of the Australian coastline, sought permission from the East India Company to return to England via Penang, Ceylon and Bombay. 'He reached Bombay for a short stay on 30 April 1804. With his geological interests, the strange formations of the Western Ghats and the rock-cut temples of Karli and Elephanta had an immediate appeal, and he executed a number of evocative drawings later published as aquatints by R.M. Grindlay.' (M. Archer and R. Lightbown, India Observed, London, 1982, p.51, and see no. 47, the original watercolour, Exterior of the Elephanta rock-cut temple, Bombay, for Grindlay's following plate).
In Grindlay's Scenery of India (for which see the previous lot), Westall's plate is accompanied by William Erskine's account of his visit to the Elephanta Cave-Temples:
'Ascending the narrow path where the two hills are knit together, we at length come to a beautiful and rich prospect of the northern part of the island, of the sea, and of the opposite shores of Salsette. Advancing forward, and keeping to the left along the bend of the hill, we gradually mount to an open space, and come suddenly on the grand entrance of a magnificent temple, whose huge massy columns seem to give support to the whole mountain which rises above it.
'The entrance into this temple, which is entirely hewn out of a stone resembling porphry, is by a spacious front, supported by two massy pillars and two pilasters, forming three openings, under a thick and steep rock overhung by brushwood and wild shrubs. The long ranges of columns that appear closing on perspective on every side, the flat roof of solid rock that seems to be prevented from falling only by the massy pillars, whose capitals are pressed down and flattened as if by the superincumbent weight, the darkness that obscures the interior of the temple, which is dimly lighted only by the entrances, and the gloomy appearance of the gigantic stone figures ranged along the wall, and hewn, like the whole temple, out of the living rock, joined to the strange uncertainty that hangs over the history of the place, carry the mind back to distant periods, and impress it with that kind of uncertain religious awe with which the grander works of ages of darkness are generally contemplated.'
In Grindlay's Scenery of India (for which see the previous lot), Westall's plate is accompanied by William Erskine's account of his visit to the Elephanta Cave-Temples:
'Ascending the narrow path where the two hills are knit together, we at length come to a beautiful and rich prospect of the northern part of the island, of the sea, and of the opposite shores of Salsette. Advancing forward, and keeping to the left along the bend of the hill, we gradually mount to an open space, and come suddenly on the grand entrance of a magnificent temple, whose huge massy columns seem to give support to the whole mountain which rises above it.
'The entrance into this temple, which is entirely hewn out of a stone resembling porphry, is by a spacious front, supported by two massy pillars and two pilasters, forming three openings, under a thick and steep rock overhung by brushwood and wild shrubs. The long ranges of columns that appear closing on perspective on every side, the flat roof of solid rock that seems to be prevented from falling only by the massy pillars, whose capitals are pressed down and flattened as if by the superincumbent weight, the darkness that obscures the interior of the temple, which is dimly lighted only by the entrances, and the gloomy appearance of the gigantic stone figures ranged along the wall, and hewn, like the whole temple, out of the living rock, joined to the strange uncertainty that hangs over the history of the place, carry the mind back to distant periods, and impress it with that kind of uncertain religious awe with which the grander works of ages of darkness are generally contemplated.'