How two English artists, a century apart, saw the Taj Mahal and what it says about colonial-era art

The English artist and poet Edward Lear went to see the Taj Mahal on 16 February 1874, and wrote in his journal as follows:

Came to the Taj Mahal; descriptions of this wonderfully lovely place are simply silly, as no words can describe it at all. What a garden! What flowers! What gorgeously dressed and be-ringed women; some of them very good-looking too, and all well clothed though apparently poor. Men, mostly in white, some with red shawls, some quite dressed in red, or red-brown; orange, yellow, scarlet, or purple shawls, or white; effects of colour absolutely astonishing, the great centre of the picture being the vast glittering ivory-white Taj Mahal, and the accompaniment and contrast of the dark green cypresses, with the rich yellow green trees of all sorts! And then the effect of the innumerable flights of bright green parrots flitting across like live emeralds; and of the scarlet poincinnias and countless other flowers beaming bright off the dark green! … Poinsettias are in huge crimson masses, and the purple flowered bougainvillea runs up the cypress trees. Aloes also, and some new sort of fern or palm, I don’t know which. The garden is indescribable. Below the Taj Mahal is a scene of pilgrim-washing and shrines, altogether Indian and lovely. What can I do here? Certainly not the architecture, which I naturally shall not attempt, except perhaps in a slight sketch of one or two direct garden views. Henceforth, let the inhabitants of the world be divided into two classes – them as has seen the Taj Mahal; and them as hasn’t.

This passage is typical of Lear in many ways. It’s a bit gushing: the phrases tumble over each other as he rushes to record his impressions without pausing to sort them out.

And those impressions are mostly of colour: what caught his eye were the clothes of the Indian visitors, the trees and flowers of the garden, and the parakeets. We can easily imagine him staring into his box of colours, matching the cubes of pigment with all the details swirling around him, and we will not fail to note the irony that he seemed to regard the Taj itself primarily as just the foil to everything else around it, being white.

Lear’s language and his eye were unique; but if this journal entry typifies him, then he too, in turn, in certain respects, typifies his age. The way visitors in the Victorian era engaged with India marked a distinct change from that of their Georgian predecessors. Contrast Lear’s response to that of the very first professional British landscape painter to visit the Taj, William Hodges, who came nearly a century earlier, on 25 February 1783:

The Taje Mahal rises immediately from the river, founded on a base or red free-stone, at the extremity of which are octagon pavilions, consisting of three stories each. On the same base are two large buildings, one on either side, and perfectly similar, each crowned with three domes of white marble … On this base of free-stone … another rests of white marble … from which rise minarets … having three several galleries running around them, and on top of each an open pavilion, crowned with a dome … From this magnificent base … rises the body of the building … The plan of this is octagon; the four principal sides opposed to the cardinal points of the compass. In the centre of each of the four sides is raised a vast and pointed arch … From the centre of the whole, rising as high as the domes of the pavilions, is a cone, whence springs the great dome, swelling from its base outwards considerably, and with a beautiful curve finishing in the upper point …

When this building is viewed from the opposite side of the river, it possesses a degree of beauty, from the perfection of the materials and from the excellence of the workmanship, which is only surpassed by its grandeur, extent, and general magnificence … the whole appears like a most perfect pearl on an azure ground. The effect is such as, I confess, I never experienced from any work of art.

These passages are extracted from a longer account that occupies nearly five pages of Hodges’s travelogue, published after his return to England. The rest is similar in tone: he attempts to give a full and detailed, measured description of the building, of its mathematical forms and carefully calculated proportions. He mentions the gardens, and he notes that the Mihman Khana was used by distinguished visitors, but he doesn’t actually describe anyone else at the site. The challenge for Hodges – as for Thomas and William Daniell, who followed him a few years later, in 1789 – was to reveal the building to their compatriots. Many Britons in the 1780s might have heard the name of the Taj Mahal but no one had seen images of it or read detailed descriptions. The task for Hodges and the Daniells was to make something that was still strange more familiar. By Lear’s time, just a century later, the Taj was already a cliché, and the question was what to do with it. His dismissive remark, “Certainly not the architecture”, speaks volumes.

It is not just about the Taj Mahal. The change described is symptomatic of a much wider shift in approach. Foreign artists in India around 1800 – one might cite the Netherlands artist Baltazard Solvyns as well – saw their work as contributing to an Enlightenment-inspired project to investigate India’s civilisations: to expose its historical cultures to Western view. Europe’s scholarly study of India’s past continued – indeed expanded – in the Victorian era, but artists no longer saw themselves as a part of it. They offered instead more personal views of Indian life, often at street level. For Lear, it was not the Taj that was “altogether Indian” but the “scene of pilgrimwashing” on the riverbank below it. His eye slid off the famous building to be caught by “gorgeously dressed and be-ringed women”.

Let’s move to another celebrated Indian site, and another riverbank: the ghats at Benares. Here, Lear pointedly distances himself from his Georgian forbears, exclaiming in his journal, “How well I remember the views of Benares by Daniell, R.A.; pallid, grey, sad, solemn.” He cannot believe what he is seeing, and how he has been misled. Daniell totally failed, in his eyes, to capture the colour and bustle of Benares, a place that Lear finds “startlingly radiant”.

Of course, we can find superficial continuities between the two periods. One is artists having friends in high places. Lear travelled in India as the personal guest of the Viceroy Lord Northbrook. We may recall that Hodges was similarly befriended and given patronage by the first governor general, Warren Hastings. But much had changed. Some of it had to do with the watershed event that marks the start of the era we are covering in this exhibition: the Uprising of 1857. The small watercolour by Lear included here depicts the ruins of the Residency at Lucknow, a key site of conflict during what the British called the “Mutiny”, and a place of British pilgrimage afterwards.

“Mutiny cities”, like Lucknow, Cawnpore (Kanpur) and Delhi, were now among the new centres of tourist attraction for travellers of all kinds, including artists. The lakes and mountains of Kashmir and the cities of Rajasthan were among other new areas to be explored. This may come as a surprise as we take their favoured status so much for granted today, but it dates only from this period. The Gangetic riverine itinerary of Hodges and the Daniells was replaced by a larger canvas of Indian destinations.

This is an excerpt from an essay by Giles Tillotson from the book accompanying the DAG exhibition, Destination India: Foreign Artists in India, 1857-1947, that is on view until August 24, 2024, at DAG, New Delhi.