Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India Richard Cronin Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin, Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. xv + 336. £75 hardback. 0 7546 3681 X. This book tells three stories. The first traces the succession of English painters who worked in India between 1765 and 1825, lured there by the enticing prospect of a new landscape and of finding patrons amongst the super-rich English nabobs: Paul Sandby reported to a friend, Zoffany's 'departure for the East, where he anticipates to roll in gold-dust'. The second tells the story of how the British presence in India developed from a first stage characterized by intellectual curiosity, tolerance, and the cultivation of intimate social relationships with Indians, to a second stage in which the British withdrew into a racial cantonment from which they ruled a nation now conceived as barbarous and alien. The third argues that just as the recovery of the classical world produced the first European Renaissance, the recovery of the ancient culture of India produced another, and that it was this second Renaissance, the Indian Renaissance, 'that would, in time, become synonymous with the European movement called Romanticism'. James Forbes was a Company employee, who arrived in India in 1765 when he was sixteen and had no formal training as an artist, but it was Forbes who first sketched the banyan tree and the cave temple at Elephanta that Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin persuasively identify as the two Indian images that were most deeply absorbed into the European Romantic tradition. In 1769 Tilly Kettle, who had established himself in London as a painter of theatrical portraits, sailed for India, to become the first important British painter of India. Kettle astutely recognized that in London portrait painting was a fiercely competitive profession, whereas in Warren Hastings' Calcutta he would have the whole field to himself. His affinity with the theatre alerted him to the splendour of Indian costume, and also, the authors suggest, allowed him in a painting such as The Ceremony of a Gentoo Woman Taking Leave of her Relations, in which a young widow prepares to join her husband on his funeral pyre, to register the action as heroic. In Kettle's hands the scene becomes operatic, an occasion for noble gesture, the young woman less a victim than an ideal of womanhood. For a brief period in the 1780s William Hodges, Thomas Daniell, and Johan Zoffany were all of them working in India. Hodges, who had sailed with Captain Cook, made visible Indian landscape, Daniell Indian architecture, and Zoffany left a record in paint of a short-lived and remarkable cultural moment. Zoffany's Colonel Mordaunt's Cock Match is perhaps the masterpieceof these years, but by 1786, when that painting was completed, the moment had ended. Even George Chinnery, 'the last Romantic artist of India', who arrived in 1802 and stayed until 1825, could only recall it nostalgically. Whereas Zoffany had paintedan India in which British and Indians came togetherto make an exuberant, unconstrained new society, Chinnery's India is fully present only in 'scenes of village life and marginal existence outside the towns and cities', in places, that is, which the British have not [End Page 295] reached. It is the function of the book's second storyto explain this sad outcome. The hero of the book is Warren Hastings. 'The Indian Renaissance in Romantic art was made possible' by his appointment in 1772 as Governorof Bengal. In 1785, when he was recalled to Britain, where he would face impeachment, and succeeded by Lord Cornwallis, the Renaissance came to an abrupt end. The huge granary that Hastings built at Patna, designed to resemble a Buddhist stupa, and represented in several paintings reproduced here, is the proper measure of his achievement, signalling both his benevolent determination to spare Bengalany repetition of the terrible famine of 1769, and his sensitive appreciation of Indian cultural traditions. The differences between him and his successors are clearly displayed in their portraits. Zoffany paints Hastings standing in front of a banyan tree, his Palladian country house in...