William Baillie (artist)

William Baillie (1752/3–Calcutta 1799) was a British artist working in India in the late eighteenth century'

Life

Levett's distillery later the Military Orphan School Calcutta Aquatint (1794) by William Baillie

William Baillie was born in 1752 or 1753.[1] He went to India as a cadet in the Bengal Infantry in 1777, transferred to the Engineers in 1778 and participated in surveying work along the Hooghly River.[2]

He went on leave without pay in 1785 and the next year started a weekly newspaper, the Calcutta Chronicle. He resigned from the army in 1788 with the intention of pursuing a career as an artist[2] However, in 1792 he became secretary of the Free School Society in Calcutta.[2] In the same year he published his "Plan of Calcutta", a reduced version of a map made by Lt. Col. Mark Wood in 1784–5.[3] In 1794 he published a set of hand-coloured aquatints entitled Twelve views of Calcutta.[1][2]

In a letter of 1795 he told his fellow-artist Ozias Humphry that he had wasted a lot of time painting landscapes, adding that "it is a pleasing pursuit, but not a pot-boiling one."[4] He died in Calcutta in 1799 at the age of 46.[2]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "North view of the Water Gate and Royal Barracks Fort William". British Library. Retrieved 9 July 2012.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 "South view of Calcutta, taken from the Glacis of Fort William / W. Baillie". Historic Houses Trust. Retrieved 9 July 2012.
  3. ↑ Chatterjee, Partha, ed. (1995). Texts Of Power:Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal. University of Minnesota Press. p. 165. ISBN 9780816626878.
  4. ↑ Tillotson, Giles Henry Rupert (2000). The Artificial Empire: The Indian Landscapes of William Hodges. Routledge. p. 121. ISBN 9780700712823.