THOMAS DANIELL, R.A. | Ruins of the Naurattan, Sasaram, Bihar

With Spink, London, by 1974;
with Lowell Libson, by 2013

London, Spink, Artist Adventurers in Eighteenth Century India: Thomas and William Daniell, 1974, no. 59

This work is exceptionally well preserved for its size and age. In general the colours have remained strong. Although there is evidence of very slight darkening of the sheet, this can barely be seen. The watercolour is well presented and ready to hang on the wall.
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Thomas Daniell, along with his nephew William Daniell, travelled far more extensively than any other British artists working on the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth century and documented a range of cultural and geographical sites. At a time when most British artists in India were portrait painters who primarily stayed in Calcutta, the Daniells’ adventurous trips ‘up country’ provided them with a very distinct source of subject matter. The present watercolour, completed in 1790, depicts the ruins of a palace pavilion which resides under an imposing banyan tree. The Mughal structure is in Bihar, an area of India 300 miles from Calcutta, and forms part of the seventh century complex of the Sher Shah Suri tomb which, prior to this watercolour, had never been recorded by a European artist. Daniell’s fascination with the exotic nature of both the landscape and architecture is evident, and this impressive sheet is likely to have been painted on the spot, making it one of the largest studies of its kind of an Indian view completed by a British painter of this period.

Thomas and William Daniell returned to London in September 1794, where they worked on oil paintings based on the watercolours completed on their tours of India, many of which were exhibited at the Royal Academy and British Institution. Using the present sheet, Thomas Daniell completed an oil painting of the Ruins of Naurattan in 1811, which is now at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.