1866
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Scene in the Upper Himmalayahs. View in the Manga Valley is a 1866 by Samuel Bourne, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a quiet valley in the Himalayas: snow peaks, a winding river, and tiny figures leading pack animals along a narrow trail. Bourne didn’t paint this—he took it with a camera. In the 1860s, he lugged heavy glass plates up steep paths to make some of the first photographs of the region. The valley looks almost untouched, but the British Empire was already changing the land. If you like these early mountain photos, look up Samuel Bourne (British, 1834–1912).
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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