1866
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Shimla. View North of Mount Jakko is a 1866 by Samuel Bourne, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a quiet hillside town under a wide sky, with snow-capped peaks in the distance. Houses and trees dot the slopes, and a few people walk along a dirt path. This isn’t a painting—it’s an early photograph. Bourne lugged heavy cameras and glass plates up the Himalayas in the 1860s, long before most people could travel there. The image shows Shimla just as the British made it their summer capital, freezing a moment before modern roads and hotels changed the view. To see how photography shaped how we picture faraway places, 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 20th-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
