1866
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Shimla. The Yarrows and Neighboring Hills is a 1866 by Samuel Bourne, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a quiet hill town in India, soft light on white houses and dark trees. Bourne lugged a heavy camera up these slopes in the 1860s. This isn’t a painting—it’s an early photograph, printed from a glass negative. The crisp shadows and sharp edges show how the camera could freeze a moment before cars or power lines changed the view. If you like this careful eye, look up the technique called chiaroscuro.
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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