Page 256 - Eye of the beholder

Though the Daniells were among the pioneer artists that captured the varied landscape of India, they were not the first to embark on an epic journey of this type. The credit for that goes to 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 seems to have vastly restricted Hodges extent of travel within India.. Under the patronage of Warren Hastings, the first Governer General of India, he was able to travel across vast areas in Bengal, and the region around Rajmahal. Paintings done by William Hodges during his stay in Bhagalpur have surfaced in the secondary art market few years back. However, his access to the south of the country and to the region around Delhi and upwards was considerably restricted due to the battles the British were fighting with Tipu Sultan in the south and with the Marathas in the north.
Perhaps the only way in which the Daniells were unique was in the prolific output of their oeuvre, and the span of the country they covered in their journey. They had come to India with the sole intention of painting India in all its variety. 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 seek money and fame in India, loaded with abundant supplies to ensure this destiny, and with geopolitical conditions in their favor, the Daniells were to eventually produce an oeuvre of more than a thousand individual original works of art including all the studies, preliminary & finished sketches, complete watercolors and the oil paintings that they executed.
In hindsight, the Daniell’s rise to fame had a lot to do with their being present at the right time in history at the right place. The evolving tastes of the times favored them. With the victory over Tipu and over the Marathas, the British had been able to consolidate their power base in India. The victory over Tipu itself had become the stuff of heroic lore back at home in Britain, and had given rise to a great deal of awareness and curiosity about India. As the British empire was increasing in its span, there was also a greater interest in art and architecture and landscape of lands far away, with a focus on the ‘sublime’ and the ‘picturesque’. Unlike their predecessors in India, who were primarily catering to the need of wealthy Indians for portraits, the Daniells focus was on the ‘sublime’ and the ‘picturesque’ in the landscape.
Opportunities for someone new to break into the English art establishment successfully at this time were few and far between. Landscape painters from mainland Europe were popular in England, and the field of portraiture was dominated by Reynolds, Gainsborough and their ateliers. News coming out of India beckoned an ambitious young artist wanting to be successful. There were other examples closer to home too. In 1781, Richard Bartwell, the son of an erstwhile Governer of Fort William in Calcutta came to settle down in the Abbey House in Chertsey, where Thomas Daniell originally belonged. It was rumored that his father had come back to England from India with a personal fortune of 400,000 British pounds – an incredulous figure for that time. With all of this happening in the backdrop, Thomas Daniell (1749 to 1840) and his younger nephew William Daniell (1769 to 1837) set sail for India on 7th April 1785.
250