Deluge and fertility: early monuments to administrators of British India in St Paul’s Cathedral, 1804–1835

Abstract

Two early nineteenth-century monuments in St Paul’s register the growing significance of the empire in India: John Bacon Sr and Jr’s monument to Bengal judge William Jones, and J. C. F. Rossi’s monument to the Governor General, Lord Cornwallis; the artists took the opportunity to explore the possibilities of Hindu art and Indian culture within the Christian space of St Paul’s. This article looks at the origins of the iconography of the two monuments, suggesting how the juxtaposition of classical, Christian and Hindu motifs in the monument to Jones suggested Bacon’s promulgation of a type of visual religious teaching, homologous with Jones’s comparative religious studies, while Rossi elaborated a theme of fertility using a mixture of themes from contemporary land reform and the Hindu Ramayana .