1866
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Hyree Lake. Hill Station in the Himmalayahs. View of the Taj Lake with Assembly Rooms, Lhutse is a 1866 by Samuel Bourne, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a quiet lake ringed by pine trees, a white building on the far shore, and snow-capped peaks floating above the mist. This is a photograph, not a painting—Samuel Bourne lugged heavy glass plates up the Himalayas in the 1860s. The soft light and sharp focus make the scene feel like a postcard from a place most Britons would never visit. Look up other photographs in the subject of England to see how colonial eyes framed distant landscapes.
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.
See the richer artist page
