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THE DANIELLS IN INDIA Lots 4 - 24 Of the great European artists on the Indian subcontinent in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was undoubtedly the Daniells, Thomas (1749-1840) and his nephew William (1769-1837), who played a pre-eminent role in recording and documenting the country for European eyes. Their seven year tour of India from 1786-1793, and the subsequent publication of their work, brought to the public in Britain an unrivalled view of the scenery and architecture of this fabled and exotic land. Other artists, notably William Hodges (1744-1797), who made a tour up the Ganges in 1780-1783 (see lots 1-3), provided inspiration for the Daniells. Encouraged by Hodges's work, the Daniells set off from England in 1786 to make their fortune in India: up the Ganges, 1788-91, a circular tour around Mysore from Madras, 1792-99, and finally on their return journey to England in 1793 visiting Bombay and its temple sites, sketching, drawing and painting as they travelled. Arriving back in London in 1794, the Daniells turned this substantial body of material into finished watercolours and oil paintings, which they then exhibited. On the basis of that work alone, the Daniells would have secured a prominent place in the history of Anglo-Indian art, but they then embarked on a grand and extensive project to translate their watercolours into print. The result was Oriental Scenery, published in six parts between 1795 and 1808, comprising 144 aquatinted plates, and regarded as the unsurpassed achievement of Anglo-Indian Art in the period. Further to this, in 1836 The Oriental Annual was published in five volumes. The 22 plates were accompanied by Reverend Hobart Caunter's descriptive account of the Daniells' travels. William Daniell was only fifteen when he went out to India with his uncle and so the on-the-spot drawings, particularly those dating from early in the trip, are largely attributable to Thomas Daniell, while William kept a journal of their travels which provides an invaluable counterpart to Thomas' visual record. The engravings, however, were very much a joint project, and William reported to the artist and diarist Joseph Farington that he worked on it from six in the morning until midnight each day for seven years. It was a venture of monumental scale, and constituted the first detailed record of the great Hindu monuments of the Ganges basin, and across India. The aquatints were originally issued loose-leaf, although their title pages indicate that the artists intended they be grouped in six separate volumes, each comprising 24 plates. Strictly speaking, only the first three volumes bear the title Oriental Scenery, volumes IV, V and VI are entitled respectively 'Twenty-Four Landscapes', 'Antiquities of India', and 'Hindoo Excavations', but we have followed the widespread convention of referring to all six volumes as Oriental Scenery. The prints and drawings offered below demonstrate Thomas Daniell's interest in picturesque composition. He carried with him mezzotints of Claude's landscapes, and was able to fuse the precision of topographical drawing with European ideals of the sublime and picturesque as he approached the new subject-matter he found on the Indian subcontinent. Through exhibitions of their oil paintings at the Royal Academy and British Institution in London in the early 1800s and through the watercolours and fine aquatints, the Daniells captured the attention and interest of the British public, focusing on this distant and exotic part of the British Empire.

Thomas Daniell, R.A. (1749-1840)

Hill House, former residence of Augustus Cleveland at Bhagalpore

Details

Thomas Daniell, R.A. (1749-1840)
Hill House, former residence of Augustus Cleveland at Bhagalpore
oil on panel
23 x 32 in. (58.5 x 81.3 cm.)

Provenance

Colonel Grant.
with Spink, London, 14 September 1972, where purchased for the present collection.

Literature

M. Shellim, Oil Paintings of India and the East by Thomas Daniell, R.A. (1749-1840) and William Daniell, R.A. (1769-1837), Londo, 1979, p. 40, ill. TD15 and pl. II in colour.
W. and M. Archer, India Served and Observed, London, 1994, p. 82 and p. 83, illustrated on the cover.

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Lot Essay

The Daniells stayed with Samuel Davis, the local administrator, at Bhagalpore, Bihar in 1790-91. There they worked up many of their drawings into oils for sale in the Calcutta Lottery and it was during this period that this picture was painted. Davis was an amateur artist. He had visited Bhutan and returned with drawings and watercolours which William Daniell later engraved. While staying with Davis, the Daniells made a number of expeditions up and down the Ganges recording the local scenery.

Hill House, situated on the Ganges at Bhagalpore, was built by Augustus Cleveland (1755-84). During his time as Collector of Bhagalpore District, Cleveland had become attracted to the Paharias, a local tribe, who he organised into a Corps of Hill Rangers to help police the area. He was to become a generous patron of William Hodges and took him out on tour in the district in 1780.

Over a century later William Archer was transferred to Bhagalpore as District Magistrate in 1937. Mildred Archer records in their memoirs walking along the very bank from which the picture was painted and later purchasing this picture, referred to as 'Cleveland's House', on their return to London in 1972.

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