Tomb of the Emperor Togluck, Togluckabad
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
Tomb of the Emperor Togluck, Togluckabad is a 1866 by Louis-Théophile Marie Rousselet, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A crumbling stone tomb rises in the middle of a dry plain, its domes and arches half-swallowed by time. Dusty light slants across the ruins, picking out cracks in the walls. Rousselet sketched this in 1866 while traveling through India. He worried his drawings weren’t enough, so he taught himself photography there—no easy feat back then. The photo-like detail in this print comes from that switch. If you like quiet ruins, look up the subject “france, 19th century” for more travel sketches from the same era.
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.
See the richer artist page
