Page 223 - Eye of the beholder

in the value of their own culture and precipitated the decline of traditional Indian arts. The work of itinerant Western academic artists who visited India in large numbers between the 1760s and the 1860s provided the model for what came to be considered a more scientific and therefore more advanced art in nineteenth-century India. Amongst the earliest European artists who visited India were William Hodges, Thomas and William Daniells Tilly Kettle, John Zoffany, Emily Eden and others. Tilly Kettle was the first professional painter to gain access to Indian rulers. In Madras, it was to Mohammed Ail, the Nawab of Carnatic and at Faizabad to Shuja-ud-din Daulah. After 1780 a number of skilled British professional artists visited India and keenly observed the land through the lens of contemporary European taste which foregrounded passion for the picturesque and the sublime.
THE SUBLIME AND THE PICTURESQUE
British society until the late Eighteenth-Century had no visual idea of the Indian sub continent, basing it fundamentally on the first-hand observations made by the artists in their paintings. The picturesque voyages undertaken were without exception deliberate expeditions in search of the exotic, as shown by William Hodges in his writings. The definition of new aesthetic categories such as the picturesque and the sublime were supposed to be the big reason for artists embarking on expeditions to unusual places, the definitions fitting perfectly with the scenes the Orient offered them. This search for ‘exotic’ within European art circles was the main reason for both Hodges and Daniells’ selling more works in England than they had ever sold in India.
Though the Greek philosopher Longinus explored the idea of sublime in the first century A.D., the concept did not enter mainstream European thought until the 1700s. As a category of aesthetics used to classify the landscape and its representation in the visual arts, the sublime tended to be associated with the period roughly between 1750–1850 when a new emotional response to landscape first developed in the works of Romantic painters, and found full expression in the art of famous English painter J.M.W. Turner. Traditionally the symbolism associated with themes such as vastness, transcendence and terror, were nevertheless regarded as manifestations of the sublime.
Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) explored the sublime in terms of physiologically related responses to phenomena, differentiating the sublime from the beautiful for its capacity to evoke intense emotions and inspire awe through experiences of nature’s vastness. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant focused his study of the sublime on the viewer’s emotional response to the infinite, dynamic, and fearsome qualities of nature, which dominated the continent. This differed from Burke’s theory in focusing more on the concept as a mental condition, or an aesthetic experience that emerged from perceiving something boundless or infinite. All Romantic painters were influenced by the aesthetic of the sublime. In capturing the effects of boundlessness, Burke and Kant saw it as a prerequisite for the sublime in verbal and visual representation – the sublime being something that can be evoked but not achieved.
Derived from the Italian pittoresco, “from a picture,” the term ‘picturesque’ defines an object or view worthy of being included in a picture. The picturesque was formulated into an aesthetic category in late eighteenth-century Britain, and primarily applied to the practices of landscape
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