1866
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Shimla. View of the Church from Mount Jakko Looking West with Part of the Mall in Winter is a 1866 by Samuel Bourne, a Impressionism work, depicting Snow, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a snowy hillside town with a church steeple poking through bare trees and a winding road below. This photo was taken in the 1860s by a British photographer who lugged heavy glass plates up the Himalayas. The view shows Shimla, the summer capital of British India, before cars and power lines. The quiet snow makes the colonial buildings feel like a postcard from another era. If you like old travel photos, look up The Cleveland Museum of Art for more of Bourne’s India.
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.
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