Page 278 - Eye of the beholder

EDWIN LORD WEEKS [1849-1903] BOMBAY STREET SCENE 1800S
A versatile personality, Weeks was a distinguished artist of oriental scenes, adventurer, travel writer and cultural commentator, he along with Frederic Arthur Bridgeman was one of America's most celebrated Orientalist and an expatriate artists. Over two decades from the 1870s through the 1890s, the Boston native and Paris resident traveled throughout Spain, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, Persia and India, venturing well beyond "the Orient" familiar to many of his professional colleagues. His scenes of Egypt and Morocco established early successes for him in France and America. Travels to India, which began in 1882 inspired a new vision, centered on its impressive and historical monumental architecture, colorful street life and vibrant culture. His fresh, bold images of India distinguished Weeks from rival American and European Orientalist painters, that to a large extent was responsible in shaping and establishing his later reputation, that also brought him sustained international acclaim.
Weeks' reputation enabled a construction of his artistic identity as a fearless "artist-adventurer". His enduring associations with the École des Beaux-Arts and French artists Léon Bonnat and Jean-Léon Gérôme well known for their academicism and bringing academic painting tradition to an artistic climax. Despite these academic affiliations, Weeks' predilection lay towards rendering the effects of sunlight, glare, immediacy and viewer participation, which clarifies that he was sensitive to and much aware of the contemporary aesthetic concerns. Weeks' major paintings of India exhibited at the Paris Salon and internationally, emerge as conceptually innovative and transformative when viewed against the long French and British traditions of visualizing India. Moreover, his paintings may be read as richly layered commentary on contemporary topics such as architectural preservation and the geopolitics of South Asia. The cross-cultural circumstances of its production, integration of the French and British visual and textual sources, and the dominant ubiquitous backdrop of colonialism reveal Weeks' career as a complex transnational project grounded in an American identity and perspective.
Representation in Weeks’s work is similar to what was generally considered artistic representation in Western theory, with the predominant element of mimesis or imitation and arousing emotions. Weeks’s work therefore represents India, by stressing on its likeliness and imitation, while keeping in mind his western audience. Weeks’s understanding of India is an amalgamation of his direct physical observations and his imagination. As Donna J. Peuquet defines “Observation and direct experience alone are not sufficient for understanding. Our experiences must be connected with and integrated into our existing knowledge, with similarities confirmed, differences noted and resolve, and links made across domains. This is how we derive a unified world view and build a broader understanding of our environment. This is the realm of imagination”. Thus, Week’s imagination contributes to understanding and representation; while he encounters with unfamiliar India and tries to understand it while referencing it with familiar European places. The general formula based on Weeks’s understanding is presentation of India, through architecture as stage setting, which prevails in his mature style and repeatedly occurs in his Indian oeuvre. Later, he filled this stage with natives to reflect his romantic imagination. Weeks conducted many of his studies on the spot,
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