‘Sketches illustrating the manner of customs of Indians and Anglo Indians drawn on stone from the original drawings from life by William Tayler esq.’ is a collection of six lithographs published in London in 1842. It portrays the luxurious everyday lives of Anglo-Indians in great detail while also depicting aspects of Bengali village life. It… Read more »
‘The European in India; from a collection of drawings by Charles D’Oyly, Esq. engraved by J.H. Clark and C. Dubourg; with a description by Captain Thomas Williamson; accompanied with a brief history of ancient and modern India…by F.W. Blagdon Esq.’ is a collection of English colour plates about colonial life in India, with plates after… Read more »
East India Company was a highly influential force in Britain by the end of the 18th century. It was fabulously wealthy, and the British leaders were among its stockholders. Naturally, then, there was curiosity among the ordinary Britons about the people in a faraway land whose politics and culture was suddenly part of the national… Read more »
The first wave of European immigrants included sailors, emissaries, merchants, and the armed forces, people who could seize the land; the next wave included physicians, cartographers, botanists, and naturalists, people who could research it. In the hope of finding new medicines and new sources of revenue, they studied Indian plants, and created or commissioned thousands… Read more »
Flowers of the Bombay Presidency offers fascinating insights into the botanical beauty of the western states of India in the 1880s, with 202 illustrations of Indian flowers and plants in watercolour painting. Nearly all of the paintings are supplemented by a handwritten pencil inscription with the name of the flower (often in Latin with the… Read more »
It’s a word that makes us cringe today, but the ‘Orient’ was a place of infinite charm for artists of Victorian England. To them, the British colonies of the East were exotic regions of smouldering intrigue, where dark-eyed, inscrutable people went about their mysterious ways. Of course, now we know this attitude to be ignorant—at… Read more »