Volume 33, Number 15 · October 9, 1986
The Sahib's Pictures
By Stuart Cary Welch
From Merchants to Emperors: British Artists and India, 1757–1930
by Pratapaditya Pal, by Vidya Dehejia
Cornell University Press, 264 pp., $75.00
Ironically, the least 'Indian' exhibition among those of the nationwide Festival of India was organized by two scholars from India. This is so not because of the subject—British watercolors, drawings, prints, and photographs relating to India, from 1757 to 1930—but because a significantly large proportion of the works in the exhibit conform to the taste not of internationally minded specialists but of some ghostly Colonel Blimp eager to please an equally outdated John Bull. Although it would be extremely difficult to assemble a perfectly balanced selection, either on historical or aesthetic grounds, one must question the conventionally 'colonial' tenor of the present choices. But before this ruffling problem can be considered it must be pointed out that we are concerned not with the exhibition 'From Merchants to Emperors,' at the Morgan Library from May 1 through July 31, 1986, and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from September 9, 1986, to January 4, 1987—largely taken from the collections of Paul Walter of New York City—but with the stimulating and informative book of the same title, which doubles as a catalog to the exhibition. Its well-reproduced illustrations have been amplified by one hundred or so others or works from public and private sources in India, England, and elsewhere.
Review, 2488 words
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