The Lanka Palace in the Kaiser Bach, Lucknow
Louis-Théophile Marie Rousselet
1866
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Louis-Théophile Marie Rousselet
1866
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
The Lanka Palace in the Kaiser Bach, Lucknow is a 1866 by Louis-Théophile Marie Rousselet, a Impressionism work, depicting Palace, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a grand palace lit by golden light, its domes and arches rising against a dusky sky. Figures in loose robes walk the terraces, tiny against the towering stone. Rousselet drew this while traveling through India in the 1860s. He worried his sketches couldn’t show the real scale, so he taught himself photography there—something few Europeans did at the time. The palace in the picture is actually in Lucknow, not Lanka, a mix-up that stuck. To see how other artists drew faraway places, look up *subject: france, 19th century*.
Concerned that his drawings did not do justice to the splendor of India’s monuments, Rousselet learned photography in India that year, a remarkable accomplishment. He proved to be a talented photographer with a sophisticated sense of composition. The scenes in this volume sweep across sites of Sultanate, Rajput, and Mughal power in northern India, from the sacred Hindu city of Varanasi on the Ganges River to Alwar in Rajasthan. Also included are several scenes of industry and portraits of Indian rulers.
Louis Rousselet described himself as a “scientific traveler” when he went to India alone at age 18 in 1863 and stayed into 1868.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Louis-Théophile Marie Rousselet (1845–1929) was a French artist.
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