India in Aquatints

In Britain 200 years ago, the thirst for the picturesque was almost as powerful as the thirst for port. Since Queen Elizabeth's day, there had been a lively interest in the "luxuriance of fancy" and "fayr-est workmanshippe" that assumed the Orient to be one vast curio shop. Toward the end of the 18th century, travelers began to bring back reports of more solid architectural wonders to dazzle the imaginations of stay-at-home Britons, and artists started to make sketching trips to China and India to satisfy this curiosity about all things Eastern. Most important of these was an uncle-and-nephew team. Thomas Daniell and his 17-year-old ward William. This week a show of their work, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, opens at the University of Chicago.

With Camera Obscura. The Daniells landed in Calcutta in 1786. spent two years making sketches of the city for a series of aquatints. The pictures were published back in England with such success that the artists decided to penetrate into upper India on "guiltless spoliations'' of more picturesque material. Laden with tents, palanquins, great stocks of paper, canvas, paints, pencils, a camera obscura (for sketching views projected through a lens) and a "perambulator" (for measuring their mileage), the Daniells and a retinue of servants set out by boat to sketch Mother India. So adventurous and rewarding were their travels that it was 1793 before they finally got back to Bombay to set sail for England.

In many areas of India they were the first Europeans to arrive, and they made rapid pencil sketches of whatever caught their eyes, laying on a monochrome wash with color notations. These were later worked into finished watercolors. oils, or engravings. At first, Thomas, who was then in his late 30s and had trained at the Royal Academy, did most of the drawing, leaving the mechanical tasks to William; but William rapidly developed into a competent artist, and before the safari was over was signing many pictures himself. Much impressed by the gateway leading to Akbar's Tomb at Sikandra, William noted in his diary that the road approaching it is "covered with Buildings & Ruins the Whole way. The Whole put one in mind of the Appian Way on account of the numerous remains of considerable buildings." The watercolor that resulted from this visit shows the Daniells' camping party established outside the gate like a prosperous traveling circus.

Explosive Influence. Back in England, the uncle and nephew spent the next 13 years making 144 aquatints for Oriental Scenery, a six-part work published between 1795 and 1808. This was followed in 1810 by A Picturesque Voyage to India by the Way of China with 50 illustrations. The influence on building, landscaping and interior decoration of these books was almost explosive. A cult of Indian architecture arose, and country seats in such unlikely places as Gloucestershire sprang up disguised as Hindu temples, inspired by the Daniells' sketches.

Just as Audubon and Catlin would later interpret the people and wildlife in unknown outlands of the U.S. to the Americans of their day. Thomas and William Daniell gave Britons their first good look at what things were like "out in India." As translations of Indian classics and his tories gave England a new imagery, their pictures gave the image visual form. The Daniells, who knew that their watercolors of rugged hills, exotic foliage, vine-choked ruins and thronged temples were vastly popular with seekers of the picturesque, were nonetheless mindful of a responsibility to keep their interpretations accurate.

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