1866
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Shimla. View on the Mall in Winter is a 1866 by Samuel Bourne, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a snowy street in Shimla, India, lined with British-style buildings and bare trees. A few people in heavy coats walk along the slushy road. This painting is actually a photograph—one of the first taken in the Himalayas. Bourne lugged his heavy camera up the mountains in the 1860s, capturing places most Brits back home had never seen. The snow makes the scene feel quiet, almost like a pause in time. If you like this, look up *Samuel Bourne (British, 1834–1912)*. His photos show how the British saw India before modern changes.
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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