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 »
Thomas and William Daniell were a British artistic duo of uncle and nephew who visited India in 1786 and made some iconic watercolour paintings and aquatint engravings of the monuments and landscapes here. To many Britons of the Victorian era, the Daniells’ picturesque art of the Subcontinent were the defining views of the ‘exotic East’—which… Read more »
Hustlers, artists and adventurers, the Daniells worked a dream job even by today’s standards. They journeyed to exotic locations most of their countrymen had never even heard of, making art and selling it to finance further travel, which would inspire more art. Think of them as 18th-century travel bloggers. Minus the sponsored posts—unlike European contemporaries… Read more »