PORTRAITS OF A PEOPLE
Etchings by the colonial Flemish artist F. Baltazard Solvyns are getting a new lease of life in an exhibition at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai
The Flemish artist F. Baltazard Solvyns (17601824) lived in Calcutta in the 1790s and produced a sizeable set of etchings depicting the common people and scenes he encountered during his stay. An exhibition titled People of Bengal: Coloured Etchings by Baltazard Solvyns at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai has brought together 288 etchings from the second, enlarged edition of Solvyns’s Les Hindoûs, which was published in Paris between 1808 and 1812 in four volumes. The exhibition, which is on till June 29, has been curated by DAG, which owns the etchings. Solvyns was not your typical colonial painter, although his work is an important precursor of the ‘Company’ style of painting.“Among all attempts by foreign artists to present a complete view of India, none is so focused on people as the work of François Baltazard Solvyns,” writes curator Giles Tillotson in the exhibition catalogue. The volumes were a commercial failure, Solvyns having eschewed the nabobs and landscapes that were popular with Europeans at the time for sombre depictions of castes, costumes, professions, modes of transport, musical instruments, festivals and much more (but women were few and far between). DAG hopes a modern audience will have a nuanced appreciation of Solvyns’s detailed pictorial catalogue of the Indians. “It is not so much the style as the subject matter that distinguishes Solvyns from other colonial artists of his time (1790s),” says Ashish Anand, CEO & MD, DAG. “He is more focused on people, especially common people, not elites or landscape—which was the predominant focus of other Western travellers into India. As such, this is the first ethnographic visual account of the peoples of Bengal, and its importance lies therein.” Over the past few years, DAG has focused on curating exhibitions from its growing collection of premodern art to showcase works by foreign artists who travelled to India between the late-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries. For DAG, “such exhibitions serve as a catalyst for not only arousing interest in art but also historical narratives of the period”. “Why limit these works to Western audiences when we can bring them back and share them here, and see what Indian audiences today make of them?” says Anand.