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An Indian Encounter: Portraits for Queen Victoria
13 November 2002 - 19 January 2003
Room 1. Admission Free
Sponsored by Océ
A remarkable group of Indian portraits commissioned by Queen Victoria during the height of British imperial rule in India will be shown in London for the first time. Painted by the Austrian artist Rudolf Swoboda (1859-1914), these arresting paintings are unlike so much ethnological portraiture and photography of the period in their immediacy and sensitivity to the sitters. Swoboda's portraits give an acute sense of the individuality of each person as well as describing their social identity through finely observed detail. The paintings are normally displayed in Osborne House, Queen Victoria's summer residence on the Isle of Wight, now an English Heritage property. The paintings are being generously lent from the Royal Collection by Her Majesty The Queen.
The earliest portraits coincide with the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 that celebrated Queen Victoria's Jubilee. The exhibition organisers brought a group of thirty-four men from India - identified as weavers, potters, coppersmiths, carvers and silversmiths - to form a living display of “native artisans” and the Queen commissioned Swoboda to paint five of them. Ironically and contrary to repeated claims from the organisers that the artisans represented the timeless practices of the Indian village, their skills were probably learned at the Central Jail in Agra from which they came, as part of a process of prison reform.
Following the success of these paintings Swoboda was sent to India at the Queen's expense to produce sketches of the local people, comprising Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus, men, women and children, and including military officers, artisans, a snake charmer and a juggler. The artist visited Bombay, Agra, Rawalpindi, and Peshawar and spent the summer of 1887 in Punjab with Lockwood Kipling, the Director of the Mayo School of Art in Lahore, and Rudyard Kipling's father. One of the paintings depicts a student of Lockwood Kipling, Sunder Singh, the ten-year-old son of a silversmith. Swoboda identifies his military subjects by their uniforms, regiments, and ethnicities. Particularly striking are the portraits of Bulbir Gurung, the Nepalese Sepoy in the Gurkha Army, and of Bal Singh, a Sikh member of the Bengal Cavalry. The absence of the educated Indian middle classes in the portraits reflects Queen Victoria's fascination with the “authentic” or exotic Indian subject.
Back in England Swoboda was commissioned to paint Ram Singh, the architect of the Durbar Room at Osborne House, and several of the Queen's Indian servants, including Abdul Karim, the 'munshi' or tutor who taught her Urdu and Hindustani. Also included in the exhibition is the only subject painting Swoboda made for Queen Victoria. 'A Peep at the Train' shows a view of the Indian landscape from a train and uses some of the Indian portraits as the models for the villagers who gaze with curiosity at this symbol of Imperial supremacy.
For further press information:
Tel: 020 7747 2512 (Exhibition enquiries -Cathy Hinde)
Tel: 020 7747 2865 (General Press enquiries)
Tel: 020 7747 2596 (Press photographs)
For public enquiries please quote General Information Tel: 020 7747 2885
August 2002
Back to 2002 Press Releases
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