A RARE INDIAN COLONIAL SILVER ASKOS (ASCOS), GEORGE GORDON & CO., MADRAS, PROBABLY 1840S

The inscription reads: 'Presented to J. Sanderson Esqre. by W. E. Cochrane Esqre.'

The original askos upon which all copies are based is of ancient Roman bronze manufacture, having been discovered at Herculaneum and is now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples (inventory no. 69167). The present example is probably a copy of one made in the mid 1830s and retailed by Storr & Mortimer (workshop of Paul Storr) and exported to India.

George Gordon & Co. was in business at Madras between about 1821 and 1848. One of the firm's employees, Mr. Andrew Barron, died there on 15 July 1832.

It may be a coincidence but in the Madras Exhibition of 1855 two of the exhibitors mentioned on the same page of the Official and Descriptive Catalogue are J. Sanderson, Esq., Medical Establishment (class CLVIII) '1 Piece of Kyabokka wood' and W.E. Cochrane, Esq., Civil Service, (class XLIV) '1 Specimens [sic] of Photography.'

It seems likely that J. Sanderson was Dr. James Sanderson (1812-1895), a native of Dunbar, Scotland, who was a medical student at Edinburgh University. In 1836 he was appointed Surgeon in the Madras Medical Service. He returned to Scotland in 1863 and died in 1891.

RELATED LITERATURE

Frequent references are made in Indian Colonial sources to W.E. Cochrane who in 1853 was sub-collector at Salem in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, inland from Madras (modern Chennai). According to John Falconer, A Biographical Dictionary of 19^th Century Photographers in South and South-East Asia, Cochrane, the son of James Cochrane and his wife Ellen, was born in 1816 and educated at Haileybury. He worked in India where he became a noted amateur photographer and an early member of the Photographic Society of Madras. He died in Madras on 8 May 1861.