Out of Phase: The Daniells' India

By a stroke of good fortune a recent visit to the imposing masterpiece, the Victoria Memorial at the south end of the Maidan in Calcutta, included a viewing of an extensive exhibition of the paintings and aquatint engravings of the orientalist illustrators, the Daniells, Thomas and William. The Daniell's India - Views from the 18th C.

In 1784 the two Daniells – William being only sixteen years old at the time, and Thomas, in his thirties, being an unsuccessful artist who had worked painting coaches – travelled to the wide lands of British Hindoostan via China seeking fortune and fame. It was an extraordinary adventure into the unknown. As it happened, they spent over ten years there and in that time produced a series of illustrations and oil paintings that subsequently became celebrated in England and to this day form an enduring record of the land, people and monuments of India in the era of the East India Company.

Australians, such as the present writer, will recognize their style. British artists used the same methods to capture the new landscape of Terra Australis in the same period. The Daniells’ work strongly resembles early Australian art, being an attempt to render the strange and exotic in forms that are accurate in themselves but also accessible to the English public. While early Australian art is often derided as colonialist kitsch, however, the work of the two Daniells is prized and feted, including by the Indians who acknowledge its historical significance, its care for detail and its fine beauty.

The remarkable thing about the Daniells’ engraving is that neither of them were proficient in engraving techniques when they arrived in Hindoostan; they had to refine what few techniques they did know from local Indian craftsmen. Penniless but enterprising, they proposed, as a money-making venture, a series of twelve engravings of prominent landmarks around Calcutta and placed an advertisement in the Calcutta Chronicle in July 1786 to that effect, seeking help in the venture. This series, published two years later, hand coloured by local artists, became so popular that they then undertook other series, first travelling north of Calcutta, and eventually travelling throughout the entire sub-continent. To fund their further travels they held a lottery of their completed engravings in Calcutta in 1791 and other lotteries along the way.

It is evident, upon viewing the exhibition in the Victoria Memorial, that Thomas was the illustrator while William was, arguably, the better painter. Thomas had a better and more precise eye for architecture and detail, while William was more accomplished at capturing atmosphere. All the same, William laboured tirelessly in his workshop back in England for years to perfect the aquatint technique that they favored. It is a pity that the large oil paintings done by the Daniells now showing in the collection of the Victoria Memorial are somewhat grubby from exposure to the polluted air of the modern city and have surfaces that are in dire need of cleaning.

Returning to England in 1795, the Daniells published a six volume work with a total of 144 plates under the general title of ‘Oriental Scenery’. A complete set sold for the princely sum of £210. It is one of the finest collections of orientalist illustrations extant. They also published a second collection in 1810 entitled A Picturesque Voyage to India, by Way of China. Accompanying these wonderful illustrations, they also kept detailed diaries on many of their travels, text and picture together constituting an invaluable record of early British India. It is highly appropriate that these works are now to be seen in the Victoria Memorial, itself the great monument to Britain's historic embrace of Indian civilisation.

Here below are samples of the Daniells' work. It is often not clear who did what, Thomas or William, and so it is customary to refer to them as a single team, the artist is thus "The Daniells".