Consuming Exotic Leisure
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Despite the book's title referencing seventeen years, Forbes himself states in Oriental Memoirs that he served in the British East India Company for eighteen years. The biographical sketch of the author in the same volume offers further clarification. Born in May 1749, Forbes was appointed to Bombay before the age of sixteen and returned to England in 1784. His actual time in India was therefore closer to eighteen or nineteen years.
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Romita Ray, Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2013), 4.
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Robert L Hardgrave, A Portrait of the Hindus: Balthazar Solvyns & the European Image of India 1760-1824 (Oxford University Press, 2004), 347.
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Maria P Gindhart, "Ethnographic Exoticism: Charles-Arthur Bourgeois's Snake Charmer," Material Culture Review 79 (March 2016): 8.
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Ray, Under the Banyan Tree, 17.
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Ray, Under the Banyan Tree, 112.
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Gindhart, "Ethnographic Exoticism," 9.
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Natasha Eaton, "Virtual Witnessing? Balthazar Solvyns and the Navigation of Precision, C.1790--1840," Journal of Historical Geography 43 (January 2014): 51; Gindhart, "Ethnographic Exoticism," 9.
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This album is currently held in the collection of the British Museum, London, acquired from Reverend Robert Liddell (1808--1888) in 1884. It was produced in Tamil Nadu, southern India.
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Eaton, "Virtual Witnessing," 53.
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Eaton, "Virtual Witnessing," 51.
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James Forbes, Oriental Memoirs (London: White, Cochrane, and Company Horace's Head, 1834), 353. Both Marc René de Montalembert (1777--1831) and his father, Jean Charles de Montalembert (1757--1810), were referred to as Baron de Montalembert. The drawing, however, is dated 1807, which aligns more closely with Marc René de Montalembert, who was then serving as a military officer in India. In 1809 he married James Forbes's daughter, Elizabeth Rosea Forbes. A letter written by Forbes in 1817 further supports this identification, referring to Marc René de Montalembert as "my son-in-law the Baron de Montalembert."
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Bamber Gascoigne, How to Identify Prints : A Complete Guide to Manual and Mechanical Processes from Woodcut to Ink Jet (1986; repr., London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), 45. The identification of the use of soft-ground etching in the print follows the catalogue entry for Oriental Memoirs at the Yale Center for British Art, which records "Soft-ground etchings by Thomas Charles Wageman," who is also signed as the engraver on the print.
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Gascoigne, How to Identify Prints, 45.
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Ray, Under the Banyan Tree, 113.