The Artificial Empire. The Indian Landscapes of William Hodges. By Valdas Jaskūnas

Abstract

Being a contribution to debates on the role of visual arts in asserting the European power in India, the book by Giles Tillotson takes as a ground for exploration the representation of Indian scenery and architecture by British artists in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, focusing primarily on William Hodges (1744-97) who was the first professional English landscape painter to visit India. The subject chosen for discussion is quite well documented, however, the interpretation presented by Tillotson comes out with simplistic freshness, which arises from an attempt to match the approaches of art-historians and critics of post-colonial cultural theory. The theoretical argument with regard to reconciliation of these approaches, advocating stylistic or ideological alignments respectively, runs mainly for consideration of the process by which works of art are produced. It is to reconsider works of art in relation with the historical events and ideas that recent post-colonial cultural theory seems to be inclined to ignore.The primary purpose of the study is to propose an answer to the question of a possible application to visual arts of recent theories of Orientalism. For this purpose author deliberately concentrates on the works of a single artist by examining them in the contexts of aesthetics and intellectual history. The motive of the art historian to take up the topic from the eighteenth century art history is clearly delineated and pertains inter alia to the changes within the very discipline over the recent decades: the lingering dominance of formalism in art analysis of the early 80s of the last century after the challenging criticism was changed by exploration of the ideological basis of art (p. 112). The art of the eighteenth century played a crucial role in this project, therefore it was particularly these attitudes towards merely identifying art with ideology that based the analysis of Orientalist constructions in art over the last decades of the 20 th century.These theoretical shifts are pertinent to Tillotson's position regarding picturesque aesthetics of which William Hodges was one of the representatives. Methodologically, however, it is a mediating force of the process of production, which is emphasised throughout the book in order to balance the feasibility of encounter and the artifact in the analysis of art. For the purpose, Tillotson deals extensively with both Hodges's paintings and prints, part of the latter published as Select Views in India (1785-88), and his publications which include A Dissertation on the Prototypes of Architecture: Hindoo, Moorish and Gothic (1787) and a narrative of his travels and observations entitled Travels in India (1793), as well as with the writings of English aesthetic theorists of the time. A comparative approach also seeks to relate the work of Hodges to contemporary theory and practice of picturesque aesthetics, which is the chief subject

Importing Arcadia into 18th‐century Madras: Poetics of the contact zone and the politics of genre in Eyles Irwin's Saint Thomas's Mount

“…Irwin's tendency to classicise, as it were, the landscape around Madras through the use of Arcadian imagery, might be seen as analogous to the manner in which contemporary British painters visiting India to visually document its topography and architecture made use of the picturesque idiom and blotted out the blemishes of 'the frequently unpleasant surroundings that characterised life in the imperial zone' (Auerbach, 2004, p. 48). As Giles Tillotson (2000), Jeffrey Auerbach (2004), and several other scholars of colonial art have pointed out, the earliest professional British artists to make a living out of sketching India for the consumption of the metropolitan gaze almost exclusively relied on the conventions of picturesque art, which enjoyed unrivalled popularity among late-18th-century audiences. Painters who engaged, both philosophically and artistically, with the ideas of the picturesque as developed by contemporary theorists like Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, 8 frequently depicted vast, desolate natural vistas dotted with rugged mountains, dark trees, and crumbling ruins, with a small number of rather diminutive inhabitants who merely served to throw into relief the grandeur of the surrounding landscape.…”

‘Enchanted Traps?’ The Historiography of Art and Colonialism in Eighteenth‐century India

“…As can readily be seen, the painted views of many men and women in colonial India bear little structural resemblance to Gilpin’s aquatints or the discussions of Price, Repton and Payne Knight. Strangely then the projected hegemony/homogeneity of the Picturesque has perhaps led scholars up the wrong garden/landscape path in their belief in its integrity and its resilience in translation (Crowley, 2011; De Almeida and Giplin, 2005; Tillotson, 2000). In a very brief article Jeffrey Auerbach evinces how different parts of the globe could be made to appear remarkably similar through visual representation (Auerbach, 2004).…”

“…One of the crucial points raised by Suleri is the vexed status of the Picturesque as a ‘gesture of self protection’ (Suleri, 1992:76). What Giles Tillotson sees as artistic restraint and hence creative impoverishment, Suleri views as conditioned by ‘the liberty of censorship’ (Suleri, 1992:83; Tillotson, 2000:18). There is I believe then a veritable discomfort involved in the wilful recourse to the Picturesque.…”