“These are such beautiful paintings,” remarked an onlooker at the opening of a new exhibition on Friday at the Delhi Art Gallery (DAG).
The paintings in question are picturesque landscapes from the early 19th century (1800-1850), filled with ruins—dilapidated forts and buildings made dysfunctional—set against sweeping, dramatic backdrops. They evoke an India untouched by modernity, but also one quietly in decay.
Take, for instance, the Ruined Mosque, the Juma Musjid, Mandu (1852) by Claudius Harris, where the dome appears worn, with outgrowths emerging from it.
Or The Palace of Tirumala Nayak, Madurai—grand in scale, yet curiously empty, with not even a single soul in sight.
“In the picturesque, architecture and landscape have to go together. The architecture has to be irregular, preferably ruined. There has to be great irregularity of form,” explains Giles Tillotson, senior vice president (Museum Exhibitions), DAG, and curator of the exhibition.
For instance, “a picture of the Taj Mahal taken from the Southern Gate isn’t picturesque because it’s formal, but if you put a great tree covering half of it, or exaggerate signs of decay, you’re making it picturesque by increasing that sense of irregularity.”
An English aesthetic that developed in the late 18th century, the picturesque was brought to India by artists such as William Hodges and Thomas Daniell, along with his nephew William Daniell.
The exhibition brings together works by landscape artists—both European and Indian—who followed them, including George Chinnery, Henry Salt, James Baillie Fraser, and Sita Ram, among others.
In one oil on canvas, Chinnery paints an ox in front of a thatched dwelling. In another, rendered in muted watercolours, he paints a tomb in Bengal, the structure dissolving into its surroundings; its edges darkened.
“The reason it’s problematic in the Indian context is if that was the idea of 18th-century India, then it was a place in decay. It showcases a civilisation that is essentially over, and ready for a young, energetic, industrial country to take over,” says Tillotson.
“True, many of the structures depicted may well have been in ruins when artists painted them; but this raises another question: why choose those buildings over others?” he writes in the book accompanying the exhibition.
“Even structures that were far from ruined—such as the Brihadishvara temple in Thanjavur—are shown depopulated, their function deliberately played down.”
Here, Tillotson notes that while the intention of the artists remains a point of academic debate, what interests him is “to show it to a young Indian audience, to say: this is a vision of your country 200 years ago. What do you make of it? And particularly, if you like it, why do you like it? What is there to like?"
"That’s not a straightforward question.” A possible answer, he suggests, lies in nostalgia. “It’s the idea that landscape is something old, ancient, untouched—chaste, even—not violated by modernism.”
While spearheaded by European painters, the style was also taken up by Indian artists, particularly in Murshidabad. One name that stands out is Sita Ram, several of whose works are part of the show at the DAG.
The show brings together British and Indian landscape paintings to examine their artistic interconnectedness and shared visual vocabulary.