Page 239 - Eye of the beholder

Though the Daniells within art historical scholarship today were among the pioneer artists who had captured the varied landscape of India, they were not the first to embark on an epic journey of this type. The credit for undertaking the long and arduous travel across the country was undertaken by William Hodges who visited India between 1780 and 1783. Hodges was a seasoned traveler artist, and had accompanied Captain Thomas Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific between 1772 and 1775. The political geography of India was in a flux during the period of Hodges stay in India. This, coupled with his ill health had vastly restricted Hodges extensive travels within India. Under the patronage of Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India, he was able to travel across vast areas in Bengal. His access to South India and to the region around Delhi and upwards was restricted due to the battles the British were fighting with Tipu Sultan in the south and with the Marathas in the north. In the internecine period since the departure of William Hodges, the balance of political power in Indian had shifted in favor of the British. As a result, the Daniells got unfettered access to parts of India where Hodges could not set foot. Armed with an ambition to improve his financial status as well as fame in India, loaded with abundant supplies to ensure this destiny, and with geopolitical conditions in their favor, the Daniells were eventually to produce a corpus of works that constituted more than a thousand individual original works including all the studies, preliminary and finished sketches, complete watercolors and the oil paintings that they executed.
South India was considerably less explored than Northern India. William's diaries notes that he and his uncle secured the services of an extensive retinue: two palanquins, each with bearers, two horses with grooms, a bullock cart, three pack-bullocks to carry tents and baggage, seven bearers to carry provisions, two porters to carry the drawing tables and a staff of personal servants. The Daniells’ works of painted landscapes, people and historical monuments aroused much curiosity, which then registered a flow of artists to the Indian colony after seeing their works as paintings, aquatints and lithographic prints in Britain. The Daniells work in India was done in oil painting and water colours. Their Indian sojourn was celebrated in “Oriental Scenery” a work of 144 hand-coloured aquatint engravings made by Thomas and William Daniell, from a selection of their drawings produced in India and published in six parts between 1795 and 1808. The Daniells were the indefatigable practitioners of Gilpin’s dictum of the picturesque. They were an inextricable part of the Romantic Movement as evidenced from their interest in painting storms, waterfalls and clouds. They became preeminent recorders of Indian monuments, many of which today have disappeared.
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