1866
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Calcutta. General View. Government House in the Foreground is a 1866 by Samuel Bourne, a Impressionism work, depicting Kolkata, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You’re looking at a wide, sunny street in Calcutta, with a grand white building—Government House—right up front. People, carriages, and palm trees fill the scene like a busy postcard from the 1860s. This isn’t a painting; it’s an early photograph. Bourne lugged his heavy camera across India to take pictures like this one. The image shows the city before modern changes, giving us a rare peek at how it looked back then. If you like old photos of cities, check out the subject of england.
The 50 images in this album, all taken in the 1860s, move from the hill towns of the Himalayas down to cities including Lahore (now in Pakistan), Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, Benares (now Varansi), and Calcutta (now Kolkata). Architectural studies of major monuments offer valuable historical records of what sites such as the Taj Mahal and the imperial mosque of the Mughal emperors in Delhi looked like before twentieth-century restorations.
Samuel Bourne, the author of most the images in this album, was a banker in England before he moved to India to become a professional photographer.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Samuel Bourne was a British photographer known for his prolific seven years' work in India, from 1863 to 1870.
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