An Illustrated Journey Round the World [antikvár]

PREFACE T ^ HIS BOOK RECREATES IN WORDS AND PICTURES THE African and Asian travels of a remarkable family of English artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Just as Britain was coming to terms with the loss of its American colonies, a landscape painter, Thomas Daniell, was preparing to document its emerging empire on the other side of the world. Practical, hardworking, and earnest, Thomas Daniell was not a flamboyant man. Nonetheless, with the assistance of his nephew William, he created a distinctive vision of the Orient that was to endure for generadons. In 1785 Thomas and William sailed via Cliina to India, where they began work on the first topographically accurate engravings of Calcutta - twelve large plates that cemented its claim to be the second city of the empire. Then, in 1789, they set off on the first of their extraordinary inland journeys, a two-year excursion across north India to the decaying splendour of Delhi, capital of the once mighty Mughal empire, and then on up into the central Himalayan country of Garhwal. At the small rustic town of Srinagar, they exchanged greetings with the Raja of Garhwal and claimed the disdncdon of being the first Europeans to have penetrated his remote mountain stronghold.' Returning to Calcutta, they paused briefly lo sell some paintings and recoup their funds before embarking on an equally arduous circuit of south India. Trekking west from Madras they climbed up into the high plateau lands around Bangalore, then worked their way down towards Cape Comorin at the tip of the subcontinent, and finally back up the eastern coast to Madras again. From there, in early 1793, they sailed hopefully for home, but were stranded at Oman, just as news arrived of the outbreak of war between Britain and France. Returning to India, they sketched in and around Bombay for several weeks, before taking a passage to China and from there, in 1794, finally back to Britain. In all their journeying Thomas and William wresded with heat, floods, jungles, war, bandits, slippery servants, cumbersome boats, and stubborn bullocks. And yet barely a day passed when they did not sketch or paint. Nothing that India's climate or disturbed polid-cal situation could throw at tiiem prevented diem from making pictures. Their reward was a vast repository of drawings which, upon their eventual return home, they worked up into a magnificent series of coloured aquatints. These prints, collectively entided On-ental scenery., appeared in six sets of 24 between 1795 and 1808. Lavish and yet delicately refined at the same time. Oriental scenery established the Daniells as the pre-eminent illustrators of Indian architecture and landscape. Their work strongly influenced domestic architecture and interior design and, beyond that, gave armchair travellers and future artists a lasting template for imagining India. Today it continues to act as an irreplaceable sourcebook for scholars and conservationists seeking to recover or restore important parts of India's built heritage since lost to tlie ravages of war and climate, and the vagaries of architectural fashion.'^ But Thomas and William were not the only intrepid artists in the Daniell family. In 1799 WiUiam's youngest brother Samuel began his own artistic voyaging, travelling first to South Africa and afterwards, in 1805, to Sri Lanka - or Ceylon, as it was dien known. Both