This handsomely produced book brings together the drawings, paintings, diaries and notes of the Scottish-born artist James Wales, together with those of his principal assistant, Robert Mabon, and his Indian associates, Gangaram Chintaman Tambat Navgire and the Goan artist, Josee. There are in addition extracts from the letters of Sir Charles Warre Malet, Resident at the Court of Pune from 1785–1797, and other contemporary records, including Marathi language sources, that give extra interest to the story. The main archive for Wales and his associates is held in the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art (and is accessible online), but other important works are held in several private collections and in public museums in India, the British Library, Tate Britain, the Wellcome Trust, the Polish Academy of Sciences, and in the Royal Asiatic Society in London. Dr Kulkarni has set this art into a bold narrative following James Wales's time in India from his arrival in Mumbai on 15 July 1791 to his death in the same town on 13 November 1795.
James Wales was an accomplished portrait painter and an exemplary architectural draughtsman. Probably his most enduring scholarly legacy is the careful measurement and depiction of the great temple caves cut into rock in western India—Ekvira, Ellora, Pataleshwar, Jogeshwari, Elephanta and Kanheri. In the 1790s these were only just becoming known to Europeans and proving for western scholarship, in the wonder of their creation, a fertile subject for archaeological, religious, and cultural study.
Wales's interest in India must surely have sprung from the fact that before he ever set foot in the country he had completed for James Forbes (who had served in India from 1765 to 1784) a painting of a banyan tree at Broach and one of the temples at Elephanta. These were engraved by James Phillips and published in a fine letterpress edition in London in 1790. Wales's association with Forbes, whose Oriental Memoirs (1813) exude enthusiasm for western India and the dramatic scenery of the western ghats, no doubt influenced his decision to apply to go to Mumbai to seek his fortune as an artist, rather than to opt for the larger, established and potentially more lucrative market that existed in Kolkata.
After his arrival in India, Wales's interest in the caves was encouraged by the uncle and nephew team, William and Thomas Daniell, whom he met in Mumbai in 1793. The Daniells were gathering material for their prospective publication Oriental Antiquities to which Wales contributed picturesque views and, with the support of his Indian associates Gangaram and Josee, supplied measured ground plans of the cave temples with sketches of their architectural details.
Part II of the book under review brings together the work done on the caves by Wales and his colleagues. It provides a salutary reminder of how little westerners knew about these holy places and it is impressive how much research, both on site and by reading, Wales did to gain an understanding of the monumental structures, their antiquity and their purpose. Wales was drawing at Kanheri on Salsette Island in the weeks before he died. His drawings prove to be remarkably accurate representations of what he saw. They constitute sympathetic renderings of what, for him, were alien cultural artefacts. The record that he helped create still stands as a waypoint for much subsequent research. Kulkarni has enriched this part of the Wales story by the inclusion of particularly fine drawings by Gangaram as well as reproductions of the finished Daniell prints and some of Kulkarni's own photographs of the sites today.
Peshwa in Durbar attended by his Minister
Wales may have been awed by the mysteries of the temples cut into the rock, and by Maharashtra's inspiring mountain ranges and contrasting landscapes, but his bread and butter occupation was as a portrait painter. He was an outstanding practitioner of the art. Very quickly after his arrival he gained many commissions from the East India Company's small Mumbai community. What survives makes us regret that so much has been lost.
Among those patrons Wales particularly impressed was Sir Charles Warre Malet, the Company's Resident (ambassador) at the Peshwa's Court in Pune. At that time Mumbai was a tiny, but wealthy, trading port nestled on the narrow coastal strip of western India and under the shadow of the Maratha confederacy whose centre lay at Pune a mere two hundred miles away but through high mountains. The Peshwa (prime minister) was still at this period the acknowledged formal head of a vast but decentralised Maratha polity stretching far north into the Gangetic plain, extending over much of Malwa and Central India, exacting tribute from territories in Rajasthan and Gujarat, and competing successfully with Mysore and Hyderabad for men and revenues in the fraught politics of late eighteenth-century Deccan.
Malet invited Wales to come to Pune. He arrived at the beginning of July 1792, making the first of several visits to the city. He was introduced to the leading personalities at the Court, including the Peshwa, Sawai Madhavrao, his chief minister, Nana Fadnavis, and Mahadji Scindia, the most powerful chieftain within the confederacy. He stayed in some comfort with Malet in the Residency and quickly received commissions from the Court. Kulkarni reproduces here those individual portraits that have survived, now scattered across the world. Of particular interest is the one Wales is believed to have completed soon after his arrival in Pune: it is of Nuruddin Husain Khan who was Malet's Persian translator and teacher and had a long association with him going back before his diplomatic assignment to Pune. This fine portrait, although known from an earlier photograph, had been in private hands and largely unseen until 2019 when it came onto the London art market. Through the good offices of Bonham's it is now included in colour in this book. It is a remarkable testimony to Wales's skill and Kulkarni believes that the painting led to a flood of commissions from other princes and ministers wishing to have themselves represented in this European fashion. Other surviving portraits included in the book are this of the Peshwa of Nana Fadnavis, Nana's wife, Mahadji Scindia, other members of the Court, besides likenesses of Sir Charles Malet, his Indian lady, Beebee Amber Kaur, other members of the Residency and Wales's own daughter, Susanna. Some of these can be found reproduced in black and white in Mildred Archer's outstanding book, India and British Portraiture 1770–1825, but it is good that printing technologies have so advanced in the past forty years that it is now possible to have the Wales paintings made so easily accessible in full colour.
Wales's reputation as an artist, though, rests on two great works in which he had the leading role. These are the Peshwa in Durbar attended by his Minister now in the collection of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Tate Britain's Madhu Rao Narayan in Durbar, which was completed after Wales's death by (and now conventionally credited to) Thomas Daniell. Kulkarni uses the material from the Paul Mellon collection to explain in some detail how these major set pieces came into being. By so doing he increases their value as historical material, and not simply as aesthetic objects. Moreover, although Wales was clearly the mind and hand behind both compositions, he drew upon sketches and detail provided by others in his studio, particularly Robert Mabon. Also, Wales was acutely sensitive as to how their respective subjects and patrons wished to be captured on canvas.
Holly Shaffer has shown in a recent article that members of the Pune court (particularly Nana Fadnavis) were active in collecting art and artefacts; and the Peshwa even had a menagerie of rare animals which, besides his horses and elephants, provided subjects for the artistic team. Like princes the world over they commissioned new work, sought to buy on the market, or simply carried off cultural objects as trophies from political or military success. Courts in Asia and Europe alike acquired rare, costly and exquisite items for their delight. The Peshwa and his colleagues were no exception in their determination to display wealth and beauty as evidence of sophisticated taste and as a display of their social and political power.
Sir Charles Malet delivers to the Peshwa the ratified treaty of Alliance
Soon after arriving in Pune, the Peshwa commissioned Wales to paint a portrait of himself with attendants. This went through several iterations. Wales produced a number of sketches (shown in this book) with varying numbers of people in it and depicting differing arrays of costly garments and objects. On 4 October 1792 Wales wrote in his diary “Spent all morning at the Durbar painting the Peshwa & gave much satisfaction”. This was followed by studio work in the Residency in which Robert Mabon made detailed sketches of the various jewels and objects that the Madhav Rao wanted to feature in the finished work. (On another occasion, Madhaji Scindia had sent over to the Residency costly jewels for Wales's to copy in detail for his portrait.) Wales drafted various proposals for the Peshwa to see before settling on the composition as a whole. Mabon's sketches are annotated with notes by Wales commenting on the detail: “this diamond is larger than any of them and hangs in the center in this manner”; “this projects from the Turban”; etc. The Peshwa's insistence on showing the magnificence of his apparel and the costly craftsmanship of a scabbard, or a vessel for rose water, or a betel nut case, risked, in Wales's view, drawing attention away from the “Noble Simplicity and grand Powerful (Harmonical) effect of the whole” which was his artistic ambition.
The final composition achieved a perfect balance: the number of attendants was reduced to two, standing in the background; the Peshwa is seated looking out slightly left of centre with light falling from the side onto his face, Nana Fadnavis sits slightly below but alongside looking towards him, the bejewelled objects, also catching the light, are displayed on the carpet in front of him. Wales's diary reveals that work on this painting occupied a great deal of his time but that it was completed before he left for Mumbai in December 1792.
Peshwa in Durbar attended by his Minister remained in Pune in the turbulent years that followed Madhav Rao's death, aged only 21, in 1795, and that of his distinguished minister, Nana Fadnavis, in 1800. These deaths significantly weakened Pune as a co-ordinating power for Maratha organisation. The conclusion of the third Anglo-Maratha war in 1818 saw the last Peshwa, Baji Rao II, exiled to Varanasi and the Pune government dissolved. The painting then seems to have gone to the Raja of Satara, being brought to England in 1831 by Colonel Archibald Robinson, who had been Resident at the Satara Court in the 1820s. Robinson's widow gave the picture to the Royal Asiatic Society in 1854 where it has been ever since.
Wales's second large scale painting was begun in October 1792, worked on by him extensively over the next three years, but eventually not to be completed until Thomas Daniell took it in hand and exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1805. It was commissioned by Sir Charles Malet to commemorate the signing in 1790 of an alliance between the East India Company, the Peshwa, and the Nizam of Hyderabad against Tipu Sultan of Mysore. Given that the Company was not regarded by all the Maratha chieftains with unalloyed enthusiasm, and that Tipu himself actively sought an alliance with the Peshwa, Malet's success in bringing Pune into the alliance was regarded as a major achievement by the British and for which he was rewarded with a baronetcy. It established in Company thinking that the best way to influence Maratha affairs was through the Peshwa at Pune—a view that persisted in British minds after political realities had changed. Mildred Archer describes the picture “as showing the whole durbar in the palace hall with Malet seated on the ground accompanied by the Residency staff, handing the ratified treaty to the Peshwa Mahu Rao, seated with his ministers”.
The subject matter is, therefore, an historic event designed to celebrate Malet's diplomatic achievement, painted long after the event itself and before the artist had set eyes on any of the participants.
Wales set about the task with the same customary efficiency he applied to his work on the cave temples. In August 1792 he attended a major religious festival at the Peshwa's palace and made sketches of the durbar hall and the ritual disposition of the principal characters. He identified those, from both the Indian and the English sides, who had been at the treaty ceremony. Many of them he had been commissioned to paint in any case, so that by November he wrote he had “made a study of the great Treaty Durbar Group and have now arranged the whole so as to have a clear Idea both of design and execution” and that he was to “take sketches of the figures from life in Black lead before I begin painting”. Mabon similarly made drawings of the scene according to Wales's design, and took down details of the durbar hall and its decoration.
For whatever reason, by the time of his death in November 1795 Wales had not worked up to final form his depiction of Malet's diplomatic coup. His unfinished canvas and associated sketches (together with many of his other Indian paintings and drawings) were taken over by Sir Charles Malet who was also guardian to Wales's orphaned daughters. They all returned to England in 1798 (Malet was to marry the eldest Wales girl, Susanna, in 1799) and Thomas Daniell was commissioned to complete the Durbar painting. Besides being exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1805, A representation of the delivery of the Ratified Treaty of 1790 by Sir Chas Warre Malet Bt to his Highness Souae Madarow Narrain Peshwa was also made into an aquatint engraving by Charles Turner, published in London in 1807 by R. Cribb. A copy of the engraving is in the Royal Asiatic Society's collection.
Dr Uday Kulkarni is an alumnus of the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune, and a retired Indian Naval Officer. He has published extensively on the history of Maharashtra in the late eighteenth-century and in the process has restored some balance to the conventional narratives, dating from the 1810s and 1820s but continuing to this day, that see nothing but intrigue, factionalism, and inevitable decline in the fortunes of the ruling houses of western India. This book, with its scrupulous assembly and editing of material from the 1790s puts western Indian society of the time, and, indeed, the attitudes and behaviour of the handful of East India Company men working out of Mumbai and their Indian associates, in a gentler, more complex and more civilised light than the stereotypical accounts of dis-functional Indian regimes and exploitative western imperialist adventurers would have us believe. James Wales and his associates captured something of the landscape, the architecture, and the peoples of 1790s Maharashtra. Wales shows us a flourishing Court that would not survive into the nineteenth century. His portraits give personality and presence to prominent statesmen of the time, while his architectural and archaeological drawings laid a foundation for future scholarship in religious and cultural studies. It is good to have these four years of artistic endeavour brought together in such an attractive book.
