Essay Example

Student McStudent

Introduction

In ART_HIST 389-0: Painting the Orient, we explored how British institutions and individuals constructed their vision of India. These cultural constructions continue to affect contemporary perceptions, so we hope to extend the current scholarship not only for art historical audiences, but for everyone.

On this site, you can read two essays: one about the work of landscape painters William Daniell, Thomas Daniell, and William Westall; and one about Fanny Parkes’ depiction of royal correspondence in her travel diary.

Representations of Landscape

Rock-Cut Architecture, The Picturesque, and British Artists’ Career Success

Remarkably, many of the most well-known views of Britain’s colonial expansion in the early nineteenth century were produced by one family – the Daniells and Westalls. Yet despite their familial links, each artist had their own styles and subject matters. Three members of this family, Thomas Daniell, William Daniell, and William Westall, had significant chapters of their careers in Britain’s colonial exploits in the Indian subcontinent, and frequently employed the picturesque to elevate their works. However, the picturesque is a broad term, with a range of meanings that are at once overlapping and contradictory. This work takes up the Daniells’ and Westall’s visions of the picturesque in depictions of rock-cut architecture on the Indian subcontinent to explore the varying forms of how the picturesque was used as a guide to aid the artists’ success in their careers as representatives of the British empire.

The divergence in the Daniell-Westall family’s artistic experiences begins with their different paths into the arts. Thomas and William Daniell began their careers in India as printmakers in Calcutta, before embarking on a four-year tour of northern India to produce prints collated into their most famous volumes of work, Oriental Scenery.1 After returning to Britain, William Daniell married Mary Westall, the eldest sister of Richard, Samuel, and William Westall.2 Richard was best known as a neoclassical watercolor painter and illustrator, while Samuel traveled throughout much of southern Africa, forming a book of prints known as African Scenery and Animals.3 William Daniell helped start his brother-in-law William Westall’s artistic career by recommending him as the landscape artist on Matthew Flinders’ expedition to Australia. Westall’s works became a formative point for Australia’s colonial representation, cementing his legacy in landscape painting.4 Across mediums and continents, the Daniells and Westalls shaped the depiction of British explorations of colonized places.

However, each artist (or duo, in the case of the Daniells) took up the task of representation differently. In particular, William Daniell and William Westall clashed over the balance between accuracy and the picturesque as the focus of representation. Joseph Farington, a close friend of Thomas Daniell’s who chronicled much of the duo’s careers in his diaries, once recorded William Daniell describing Westall’s compositions as “unsatisfactory in respect of fidelity” and only interested in “what would come well” – referencing the picturesque.5 This scathing critique highlights a fundamental artistic question for not only Daniell and Westall, but all European artists working in colonized territories: what was the optimal framing for these ‘new’ lands to best serve the British empire, and thus the artists’ careers?

Although the Daniells rejected the picturesque as a framework that prioritized an imagined British viewer’s preferences over a faithful depiction in order to be commercially successful, they nonetheless engaged an essential part of Romita Ray’s definition of the “Indian picturesque” – the management of disorientation and pleasure.6 Through the combination of precise attention to the landscape, both natural and built, and the minimization of military history, the Daniells framed Indian scenery as “aesthetically elevated” views.7 With their particular focus on architecture, the duo built their careers around a documentary version of the picturesque. Their prints and paintings transformed the foreign landscapes into easily readable, intellectually enjoyable, and accurate sources of knowledge for British viewers.

A key aspect of the aesthetic elevation of the Daniells and other British artists was enacted through a specific approach to perspective and compositional framing. Holly Shaffer’s analysis of two drawings of the rock-cut temple at Kailasha by Poona artist Gangaram Chintaman Tambat Navgire highlight the specificity and rigidity of this purported elevation: an earlier drawing that approaches the temple as a series of stacked tiers from multiple perspectives has ‘corrective’ lines to flatten the multiple points of perspective, while a later print after the artist had worked more in line with British traditions forces the site into a single-perspective panorama.8 The fixed single-point perspective acted as a comfortable lens for British viewers, already familiar with its use in many European artworks. With this established lens, artists could present unfamiliar scenes and views in great amounts of detail, capturing what was novel to the artists and audience while providing them a clear point of comparison.

This perspectival device and the Daniells’ faithful attention to detail are embodied in the 1803 print Viswakarma, Exterior View. This print was originally published as part of Oriental Scenery (published from 1795-1808), a six-volume collection of 144 aquatint prints that captured temples across India’s regions and history.9 These volumes are the Daniells’ most recognized work not just in art historical studies, but in their lifetimes. Critical reception of Oriental Scenery from 1804 praised its precise depictions, technical prowess, and novel collation of views as a masterful volume not just on its own terms, but as a rich guide to Indian architectural history that illuminated and spoke for all of Indian history.10 Contextualizing Viswakarma, Exterior View as a significant example of the Daniells’ style and career thus directs us to consider how they mapped their perspective of the picturesque on to this view of rock-cut architecture (fig. 1)

An aquatint print of a temple carved into the side of a mountain. Figure 1. Thomas Daniell after James Wales, Viswakarma, Exterior View, in Oriental Scenery, volume 5, plate 22. Printed reproduction of a hand-colored aquatint. Reprinted on page 114 of Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire, 1770-1820 (London; Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, 2019).

Immediately, the one-point perspective pulls the viewer into the temple’s architecture as it recedes into the mountain. The temple walls all pull back towards a horizon point in the center of the lower half of the composition – a viewer could easily place a ruler along any of these lines and trace to the print’s center to find the specific point of reference. The strong perspectival pull draws the eye towards the carved stone details, with the sharp contrast between the stones and rich shadows breaking up the eye’s path, inviting a closer look. The Daniells delineate each aspect of every column, niche, and frieze with crisp linework, giving a clear impression of each architectural detail. Other aspects of the scene are rendered more softly, deemphasizing them – the two figures seated with their backs to the temple are primarily defined by their pink, white, and orange garments, standing out against the muted browns, grays, and greens of the surrounding environment. Surrounding rock faces and foliage are rendered through aquatint layers, with the layers of color forming lower-contrast, organic shapes. These aspects of the natural environment frame the temple as the central focus – in the background, the slope of the mountain in the upper-right corner mirrors a dark shadow cast by the foliage in the lower-right, visually narrowing the composition at the right edge to pull focus towards the center. A similar emphasis is applied on the left side, where the dark shadow of a rock face along the entire left edge highlights the contrast to the lighter outer temple wall, drawing the viewer back to the perspective lines that pull them right to the architectural details at its heart. The Daniells’ commitment to accuracy over alterations to make a more ‘picturesque’ view does not exclude them from a careful choice of framing the sites. Thus, Viswakarma, Exterior View emphasizes how the Daniells employed the picturesque as a compositional organizing tool in support of the precise, documentary style that defined their careers.

In direct contrast to the Daniells’ focused, scholarly approach to art (and as previously mentioned, criticized by William Daniell), William Westall’s picturesque framed the exotic and unexplored as subjects of commodity. Westall’s first expedition as an artist of empire was to Australia, forming his artistic perspective around the discovery of ‘wild’ spaces perceived to have been touched less by European standards of civilization.11 He sought success in London with his depictions, but was privately disappointed by the scenery, lamenting that it was not developed enough to be ethnographically representative (and therefore valuable to British markets like his brother in law’s Oriental Scenery), and not distinct enough to provide unique and exotic scenes.12 Disappointed by his experiences in Australia, he sought new subjects for his landscapes. In a letter from early 1804, Westall writes to Sir Joseph Banks Bart about his desire to travel to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to capture the “rich and picturesque appearance of that Island,” as he found its wealth of varied subjects “extremely valuable.”13 Westall traveled not only to Ceylon, but China, Madeira, and Jamaica, before returning to England. His depictions were deemed “admirably suited to reproduction,” bringing him commercial success – particularly for his depictions of Australia and England – but less artistic esteem.14 For Westall, the picturesque was a visual framework to capture the novel beauty of wild spaces and transform it into a commercially viable work of art for the British market.

With much of his well-known career centered around Australia and England, Westall’s prints from Ceylon mark a smaller chapter of his career. However, looking closer at one such print, Hermitage at Currungalle in Ceylon, reveals how Westall’s style translated across locations and provides a rich point of comparison to the Daniells. Hermitage at Currungalle in Ceylon was originally published in 1830, as part of Robert Melville Grindlay’s Scenery, Costumes, and Architecture, Chiefly on the Western Side of India.15 Grindlay’s book reflected his interest in architecture, but numerous artists were employed in the creation of the views, from officers who contributed on-site sketches to professional artists and engravers who transformed the views of these sites into finished prints.16 This collaborative nature of the overall book thus highlights how Westall’s style was sought out to frame specific views, allowing a deeper look into his vision of the picturesque.

In Hermitage at Currungale in Ceylon, Westall’s picturesque mediates the sublime experience of a rock-cut temple, framing the hidden temple in the wilderness as a site of novelty for British viewers – thus rendering it valuable (fig. 2). The temple is depicted with fine lines carving out individual bricks and details surrounded by swathes of aquatint carving out the enveloping rock. A sharp contrast between the pale exterior wall and the shadowy interior of the temple mimics the rendering of the cleft above the temple, hiding the architectural details away until the viewer looks closer. This process of ‘discovery’ engages the viewer’s sense of curiosity that gives the viewer a sense of personal engagement in the process of colonial exploration, and delight when the temple, an architectural work more in the realm of the beautiful, is revealed amidst the sublime wilderness.

A print of a rock-cut temple with a mountain in the background.

Figure 2. William Westall (1781-1850) and R.G. Reeve (1803-1889). Hermitage at Currungalle in Ceylon, in Scenery, Costumes and Architecture of India, vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1830). Hand-colored engraving, Northwestern University McCormick Library of Special Collections.

Framing the temple as beautiful through a contrast with the sublime also helps address the temple’s perceived shortcomings in the realm of the beautiful. In the accompanying caption, Grindlay assesses the site as “not so admirable for regularity of plan or beauty of sculpture.”17 The original sketch is credited to Captain Charles Auber, and thus could have been rendered by a number of artists. Westall may have been chosen for his desire to and skill in elevating the wilderness into distinct, engaging scenes that would appeal to viewers. A mountain in the background provides visual support for this hypothesis. Dominating the left-hand side of the composition, its softer silhouette against the pale blue sky not only provides a sharp contrast to the richer tones of the rock face and temple, but creates a sense of grandeur and scale. The mountain’s shape mimics the only interior architectural detail shown in the temple, connecting the monumentality of both forms. Thus, in Westall’s view of the picturesque, nature and the built environment are treated as harmonious elements that can be arranged to make a visually compelling and exciting scene of discovery.

Ultimately, the Daniells and Westalls approached the question of picturesque representations of colonial expansion through a combination of their own interests and professional desires. For the Daniells, who built careers around attention to detail and faithful reporting, the picturesque served as a framing device to build viewers’ trust in their compositions as informational resources. However, for Westall, whose career sparked from exploration and joint desires to achieve commercial success and capture novel experiences, the picturesque was a target to style his works after that confirmed he could accomplish both of his desires. The divergence in these artists’ approaches at the forefront of representing empire thus reveals how the picturesque was a malleable tool for British artists to align their work with the intellectual and commercial desires of empire.

References:

Footnotes

  1. Fordham, Douglas. “Oriental Scenery.” In Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire, 1770-1820, 59–117. London, United Kingdom: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2019. 61-65. ↩

  2. Eaton, Natasha. “Daniell, William (1769–1837), Landscape Painter and Engraver.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Accessed February 4, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/7127. ↩

  3. Westall, Richard J. “Westall, Richard (1765–1836), Painter and Illustrator.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Accessed February 4, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/29106. & Fordham, “Oriental Scenery.” 62. ↩

  4. Fordham, “Oriental Scenery.” 61-62 & Perry, T. M. “William Westall (1781–1850).” In Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2006. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/westall-william-2785. ↩

  5. Fordham, “Oriental Scenery.” 66. ↩

  6. Ray, Romita. “Introduction – The Picturesque Prism: Refracting India.” In Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India, 1–17. PMC and Yale University Press, 2013. 7. ↩

  7. Fordham, “Oriental Scenery.” 74. ↩

  8. Shaffer, Holly. “A Poona Artist at the British Residency.” In Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking the Struggle for Western India 1760-1910, 67–130. London, United Kingdom: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2022. 102-103. ↩

  9. Fordham, “Oriental Scenery.” 60. ↩

  10. Fordham, “Oriental Scenery.” 79. ↩

  11. Westall, Richard J. “Westall, William (1781–1850), Painter and Engraver.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Accessed February 4, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/29107. ↩

  12. Auerbach, Jeffrey. “The Picturesque and the Homogenisation of Empire.” The British Art Journal. 5, no. 1 (2004): 47-54. 50. ↩

  13. Westall, William. “Letter Received by Banks from William Westall, 31 January 1804,” January 31, 1804. https://transcripts.sl.nsw.gov.au/page/letter-received-banks-william-westall-31-january- 1804-series-2344-no-0002. ↩

  14. Westall, “Westall, William (1781–1850), Painter and Engraver.” ↩

  15. Yale Center for British Art Collections Online. “Scenery, Costumes and Architecture, Chiefly on the Western Side of India / by Captain Robert Melville Grindlay.” Accessed February 4, 2024. https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/orbis:580219. ↩

  16. Archer, Mildred. “Dowlutabad, the Ancient Deo Gurh.” Victoria and Albert Museum, 2003. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O75949/dowlutabad-the-ancient-deo-gurh-print-daniell -william/. ↩

  17. Grindlay, Robert Melville. Scenery, Costumes and Architecture, Chiefly on the Western Side of India. London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1830. 35. ↩