SESSION: Britishness, Empire & the Picturesque
How did Britain visualise its Empire? Perhaps, through its picturesque depictions of landscape. 2025 marks the 250th birth anniversary of J.M.W. Turner, generating a host of exhibitions celebrating Turner’s picturesque navigations of British and Imperial terrain (think India and Wales). But there are other ‘picturesque pros’ who deserve consideration too: the Daniells’ work in India and around Britain, George Chinnery’s paintings and watercolours of India and China, David Roberts’ images of the eastern Mediterranean and Edward Lear’s views of India, Egypt and Palestine, to name a few. The picturesque’s centrality in defining, visualising and claiming the spaces of Empire warrants urgent re-appraisal – as Britain grapples with its Imperial past and its ‘post-colonial’ implications. What does the picturesque reveal about British-ness, then and/or now? Does its legacy live on in how postcolonial nations ‘see’ themselves? Is there a connection between the picturesque and national identity?
This Session is proposed in light of the Berger Trust Fellowship in the History of British Art, spearheaded by Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and The Huntington, California, which culminates in a project highlighting the latter’s British India collections (including picturesque views of the Subcontinent). The Convenors invite art historians, historians, visual theorists, curators and/or artists to probe the picturesque in the context of Britain’s internal and external colonies. We are interested in art and visual culture from the 18th century to the present day, welcoming discussions of traditional examples of the picturesque as well as contemporary artistic critiques of it.
Session Convenors:
Melinda McCurdy, Curator of British Art, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California
Zehra Jumabhoy, Inaugural Berger Trust Future Leaders Fellow in the History of British Art 2025/26 & Lecturer in the History of Art, University of Bristol, UK
Speakers:
Mrinalini Sil, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Rijksmuseum (2024-25)
Sita Ram: Master of the ‘Indian Picturesque’
The term picturesque literally means “like a picture.” As an aesthetic formula, it enabled artists to render any landscape, familiar or foreign, in a harmonious and coherent manner. During the British colonial expansion in South Asia, the picturesque served multiple functions. By creating visual equivalences with Britain, it allowed Indian landscapes to be depicted in ways that collapsed geographical and cultural distance. These images not only catered to armchair travellers in Britain but also contributed to the construction of visual knowledge that supported the East India Company’s projects of mapping, surveillance, and political control. Within this socio-political framework of the early nineteenth century, this paper examines the artistic interventions of Sita Ram, the ‘Bengal draughtsman’ who accompanied Lord Hastings on his travels across northern India. While Hastings’ journal provides a textual account of the journey, Sita Ram’s paintings offer a nuanced visual commentary that reinterprets the colonial picturesque through the perspective of an Indian artist. By employing compositional strategies associated with the picturesque, Sita Ram aligned his work with European aesthetic ideals; yet beneath this formal conformity lies a subtle negotiation of power, identity, and authorship. Through a comparative reading of his paintings alongside Hastings’ journal, this paper argues that Sita Ram’s landscapes mediate between Indian and European artistic traditions while quietly contesting colonial narratives. His adaptation of the picturesque transforms it from a tool of imperial representation into a site of cross-cultural dialogue and historical reflection, marking a significant intervention in early colonial visual culture.
Aditi Chandra, Associate Professor of Art & Architectural History, University of California, Merced
Women and the Picturesque Landscape: Mughal Gardens and the Colonial Imaginary
Eugenia Herbert explains that while the nature of the British empire was masculine, gardens, which tamed the colonized landscape, “were a largely female contribution to imperial life.” And yet, the contribution of women to gardens has been underexamined. In reviewing Constance Mary Villiers-Stuart’s 1913 Gardens of the Great Mughals, Richard Temple remarks condescendingly about the “close association between gardens, domestic space, and women’s perception of them in India.” James Wescoat writes that while Indian botany was studied, Mughal gardens were not examined until the publication of Villiers-Stuart’s text. Women’s leadership, Wescoat explains, in contributing to garden history has yet to be adequately acknowledged. This paper aims to fill this gap. While it is known that the British transformed Mughal gardens into picturesque English parks, it is less known that a critique of this beautification came from Villiers-Stuart. This paper questions the idea that women could only perceive of gardens through the domestic and, conversely, also reveals the domestic as a transgressive space. Suggesting that the British love of the picturesque was embraced by other elites, I also examine the garden design at American heiress Doris Duke’s 1930s Honolulu, Hawai‘i home – Shangri La. Along with picturesque English lawns and a Chinese moon garden, Shangri La’s “global referencing” landscape also includes a Mughal Garden inspired by Lahore’s 17th-century Shalamar Bagh. I trace connections between Doris Duke’s travels to British India and the design of Shangri La’s gardens. Complicatedly, women could be simultaneously critical of and aligned with colonial approaches to the picturesque.
Anisha Palat, Independent Researcher
When Beauty Kills: Photographing Death in the Colonial Hunt
In colonial-era India, the conquest of animal life became central to the visualisation of British identity and imperial power. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, this conquest was highlighted in photographs that staged British hunters over the bodies of dead animals, translating the painterly conventions of the picturesque into photographic form by showing violence as something beautiful. While such photographs have typically been read as documents of domination and imperial spectacle, this paper offers a new perspective: it shifts attention from the glorification of the hunt to the dead animal, treating these photographs as visual archives of ecological erasure and loss rather than mere celebratory images. Drawing on material from the Cambridge South Asia Archive, it argues that the aesthetic grammar of these images – their framing of landscape, their calibration of light and distance, and their spatial arrangement of human and nonhuman figures – exposes how the picturesque made violence beautiful, and beauty, in turn, became a mode of violence. Reconsidering the picturesque through the lens of animal death opens a critique of the visual ecologies that linked British identity and power, empire, and the material transformations of colonialism. The paper reframes the picturesque as an aesthetic of domination and disappearance, one that rendered both colonised landscapes and animal lives as objects of possession, thus telling a story that contributes fresh insights to both the cultural and ecological history of animals, as well as the history of colonialism.
Susie Willis, PhD Candidate, University of Sussex, UK
Topographical Ironies: Joseph Lycett’s ‘Views in Australia’ of 1824/5, viewing the unviewed.
Joseph Lycett’s picturesque book Views in Australia, produced in London by an Englishman from Staffordshire, is nonetheless regarded, within Australia, as a foundational art document of the early colonial period. Within Britain, it is almost entirely disregarded, the Australian colonial project completely divorced from ‘proper’ British history, even Art History. If it is mentioned, it is often unfavourably compared to other artists of Views, such as Hodges, Turner or William Westall, and Lycett himself is dismissed as variously an untrustworthy forger, an ‘incurable’ drunk, even as ‘scum of the earth’ by his most extensive historiographer, John McPhee. My paper will examine his Views in a different light, situating his use of the picturesque alongside the topographic as artistic lingua francas of the British Empire, showing how, through specific detail, Lycett communicated truths that have hitherto been regarded as picturesque inventions or stylistic conventions. Just as Jane Austen in contemporary literature used an ironic voice to slip details through her texts to the initiated among her readers, Lycett’s Views, seen through an ironic reading, can reveal surprises about the otherwise hidden characters on the periphery. Apparent ‘staffage’ figures in the margins are brought to life, their individual stories adding palimpsestic layers to the surface reading of a picturesque view. Women, convicts, children, and First Nations people come to the fore in ways that enable their stories to be incorporated alongside conventional, one-note narratives. The Empirical picturesque turns out to be far from bland or surface in my View.
Helen Rowse Williams, National Trust, Attingham Park, Shropshire
Papering over the Cracks: Reframing ‘The Tiger Hunt’
A French scenic wallpaper, La Grande Chasse au Tigre dans l’Inde (The Tiger Hunt), was designed c.1808-1818 by the Parisian manufacturer Velay. Drawing explicitly from Thomas and William Daniell’s Oriental Scenery (1795-1808), the wallpaper invites the viewer to experience a fantasy of colonial India as a picturesque panorama.
Combining visual analysis with archival research, the paper asks how The Tiger Hunt sustained 19th-century imperial worldviews through picturesque conventions. Sweeping landscapes, flowing water, and architectural features are used in tandem with cultural stereotyping. Colonised bodies are subordinated and exoticised, while British figures occupy positions of leisure and command. By analysing The Tiger Hunt as both a product and producer of imperial imagination, the paper reveals how decorative art participated in the domestic consumption of Empire.
The paper examines a case study at Attingham Park in Shropshire, where the wallpaper was installed in a bathroom (overlooking the Repton-designed parkland) in the 1920s. We will consider the reasons for the fashionable resurgence of scenic wallpapers at this time and explore 20th- and 21st-century curatorial approaches to their interpretation for modern-day audiences.
Heeryoon Shin, Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Picturesque, Transferred: The Lives of the Indian Picturesque on British Ceramics
This paper traces the afterlives of the Indian picturesque as pattern designs on British blue-and-white transferware. Developed in Staffordshire in the late eighteenth century, the technique of transferring copperplate engraving to the ceramic body enabled the mass production and consumption of affordable ceramic sets in endless patterns. Popular aquatint views of distant lands, such as Thomas and William Daniells’ Oriental Scenery (1795-1808), provided a readymade source for the Staffordshire potters, who combined elements from multiple prints to create appealing designs for the expanding market. Recomposed and adapted for various shapes, in cobalt blue, coated with a luminous glaze, the transfer-printed, picturesque further domesticated the empire’s exotic domains in a triumph of British industry and trade.
The wide circulation of British transferware, however, also meant that the blue-and-white vessels and their patterns acquired new meaning and purpose that destabilized the imperial gaze. Reimported to India as transferware, the Indian picturesque found another life as affixed ornamentation in palace interiors. In Bikaner’s Junagarh Fort, transferware plates and pieces of varying patterns, including picturesque views of India, cover the walls, niches, and balconies renovated under Maharaja Dungar Singh (r.1872-1887). Taking the Junagarh Fort as a point of departure, I explore how the Indian picturesque and its newfound materiality as transferware intersected with the complex political and cultural aspirations of colonial India. I argue that such reuse of British ceramics allowed the Indian prince, expected to be “traditional” yet “modernizing” under the Raj, mediate and negotiate these contradictory demands and identities.