Solvyns

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article (or section) may need to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article, especially its section layout, and relevant internal links. (help)
This article has been tagged since December 2006.

The Flemish artist François Balthazar Solvyns (1760-1824) is little known, but his series of etchings of the Hindus provide a rich and compelling portrait of India two hundred years ago. With commitment to faithful representation and with the sensibilities of an astutely observant artist, Solvyns portrays the people of India in their occupations, festivals and cultural life with immediacy and sympathy.

Solvyns was born in Antwerp in 1760, of a prominent merchant family, and had pursued a career as a marine painter until political unrest in Europe and his own insecure position led him to seek his fortune in India. Following his arrival in Calcutta in 1791, he worked as something of a journeyman artist, but in 1794, Solvyns announced his plan for A Collection of Two Hundred and Fifty Coloured Etchings: Descriptive of the Manners, Customs and Dresses of the Hindoos. The collection was published in Calcutta in a few copies in 1796, and then in greater numbers in 1799. Divided into twelve parts, the first section, with 66 prints, depicts “the Hindoo Castes, with their professions.” Following sections portray servants, costumes, means of transportation (carts, palanquins, and boats), modes of smoking, fakirs, musical instruments, and festivals. The project proved a financial failure. The etchings, by contemporary European standards, were deemed rude and did not appeal to the vogue of the picturesque—that quest for wild, unkempt beauty—that dominated the market for prints.

In 1803, Solvyns left India for France, and soon reinterpreted the etchings for a folio edition of 288 plates, Les Hindoûs, published in Paris between 1808 and 1812 in four volumes. Even these sumptuous volumes failed commercially, victim both to the unrest of the Napoleonic wars and to the enormous cost of the publication. When the Kingdom of the Netherlands was formed in 1814, Solvyns returned to his native Antwerp, where he was appointed Captain of the Port, a position bestowed by William I in recognition of his accomplishments as an artist. Solvyns died in 1824.

Solvyns's life is itself fascinating, and his portrayal of India constitutes an unrivaled visual account of the people of Bengal in the late eighteenth century. The prints in themselves are of importance in a tradition reaching back to the early seventeenth century, and even earlier, with encyclopedic efforts to represent systematically both the unfamiliar, as in costumes of foreign lands, and the familiar, as in the typologies of peasants, craftsmen, and street vendors. In portraying the Hindus, however, Solvyns is not simply recording ethnographic types. He gives his figures individual character and places them in time and space, with narrative interest, and in doing so, he provides the viewer intimate access. This separates him from purely encyclopedic interest, for with artistic purpose he combines the ethnographic and the aesthetic. He conveys "art as information." As an artist, Solvyns provided a prototype for the genre of "Company School" paintings of occupations, done by Indian artists for the British, that became popular in the early nineteenth century. But more significantly from an historical and social perspective, Solvyns's work, with its accompanying descriptions, constitutes "the first great ethnographic survey of life in Bengal."

[edit] Published Work by François Balthazar Solvyns

A Collection of Two Hundred and Fifty Coloured Etchings: Descriptive of the Manners, Customs and Dresses of the Hindoos. Calcutta, 1796, 1799.

 A Catalogue of 250 Coloured Etchings; Descriptive of the Manners, Customs, Character, Dress, and Religious Ceremonies of the Hindoos. Calcutta: Mirror Press, 1799.  

The Costume of Indostan [pirated edition]. London: Edward Orme [1804-05], 1807.  

Les Hindoûs. 4 vols. Paris: Chez L'Auteur, 1808-1812.

[edit] Further reading

Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr., A Portrait of the Hindus: Balthazar Solvyns & the European Image of India 1760-1824, New York: Oxford University Press/Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., 2004.

Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr., Boats of Bengal: Eighteenth Century Portraits by Balthazar Solvyns (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001).

Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr., and Stephen M. Slawek, Musical Instruments of North India: Eighteenth Centuries Portraits by Baltazard Solvyns (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997).