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THE ARTS: RESTORATION
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COLOURS: (Top from left) Hindoo Women on the Banks of the Ganges
by William Daniell; View of the Esplanade from Garden Reach
by William Hodges; The Waterfall at Papanassam by Thomas
Deniell; Governor Shah (above) at the exhibition |
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Picture Perfect
A project to restore important Raj era paintings
by British artists brings some glorious canvases back from the dead
By Anshul Avijit in Kolkata
In the frazzled,
decaying city of Kolkata with its eczematous buildings and tacky modernity,
the Victoria Memorial Hall, Lord Curzon's baroque eulogy to his departed
Queen Victoria, is one of the rare landmarks of architectural reprieve.
It was a bit like everything else the perky viceroy of India did-making
sure that the imperial conceit of the Raj "didn't remain a spoken
address or a printed word" but the stone-and-brick embodiment of
an inspiring history lesson.
But Lord Curzon, who was as zealous about the
arts and archaeology as about obelisks and observances, went a step beyond.
He brought many of the paintings done by early British artists, including
the itinerant uncle-nephew team of Thomas and William Daniell, to be housed
in the building. And exactly a hundred years after the death of Queen
Victoria and about 75 years after the building was completed, the memorial
is getting a fresh lease of life.
What the project envisages is a massive restoration
that not only involves shooing away pigeons from its giant halls and putting
epoxy in the marble, but also restoring many of the 400-odd oil paintings,
the most important collection of works by British artists in India in
the early years of British rule. Some of the restored paintings are being
shown at the revamped-and pigeon-free-Darbar Hall in an exhibition titled
"The Artist's Eye: India 1770-1835".
The project began about 10 years ago when an
international group that was concerned about preserving the heritage of
what was once the capital of British India formed the Calcutta Tercentenary
Trust (CTT) in London under Allan Tritton, a banker-mountaineer-Calcuttaphile.
With the West Bengal Government, it collaborated on charting the restoration
of the paintings. Only 82 oil paintings from the collection could be chosen
(52 were displayed at an exhibition in January), but they included some
big names like Tilly Kettle, Johann Zoffany, Robert Home and Thomas Hickey.
Over the past 10 years, a highly specialised
crew of international restorers and conservationists from over 18 institutes
took turns in coming to Calcutta-alas now bereft of its Raj flavour with
its new name of Kolkata. They worked at the studio at Victoria Memorial
aided by local restorers. Says project director Philippa Vaughan: "The
idea was to get a lot of restorers who were skilled in the latest techniques
and practices. Also, as coming to India couldn't be a major career move
the restorers would come here for a season or two."
But the short stints of the restorers also caused
problems as it didn't give them enough time to complete a painting. Yet
for at least one of them the project did become a career move. Master
restorer Rupert Featherstone, who was working with Queen Elizabath's collection,
was so fascinated by the challenge that he resigned from the London-based
Royal Collection Trust and supervised the memorial workshop for three
years. He personally handled almost all the paintings in the collection
that were due for restoration but he took special interest in at least
one of them-Thomas Daniell's classic Waterfall at Papanassam. Done by
the landscape artist in 1792, the painting was so blackened with age that
a couple of the figures that were standing near the top of the falls,
most likely the Daniells themselves, were totally obscured. This painting
had been first sold in the Madras lottery a year after it was completed
so the Daniells could finance their travels.
Other paintings were also challenging to the
restorer. Telly Kittle's ceiling-long oil Mughal Emperor Shah Alam Reviewing
the Troops of the East India Company at Allahabad was worked on for a
number of years before it was finally completed this season. Now the tears
and wounds that scarred the historical scene are barely visible.
Kettle completed the painting in England in
1781, almost 10 years after the event-which in any case he had not witnessed-and
the emperor's hooked-nose likeness was appropriated from a Mughal miniature
painting of the time. Another excellent canvas, William Hodges' View of
the Esplanade, Calcutta, from the Garden Reach (1785), was severely damaged.
But four different restorers-who discovered that Indian insects had developed
a particular liking for the resin that had been used in the canvas-worked
at it for over three seasons and managed to fix it. This painting is significant
because it records the first topographical view of the growing city, showing
in placid strokes the initial impression of the travellers as they sailed
down the Hoogly river. Hodges, who had also tagged along with Captain
Cook during his second voyage to the Pacific, had toured Calcutta extensively
between 1780 and 1783.
The climate of post-modern restoration hasn't
ignored the canvas frames. In fact the relationship between the frames
and the paintings is being brought into a new focus. For example, the
frames in Hickey's portrait of Firuz Sut-chief eunuch in Tipu Sultan's
court-and the portrait of Shukur Ullah, the seventh son of Tipu, were
designed by natural history artist and portraiturist Robert Home (on the
behest of Governor General Wellesley) and were done in India.
During the restoration, expert gilder Adriano
Lorenzelli of Italy was flown in to redo and reinstate their gilt-edged
glory to, among others, these neoclassical and the "Carlo Maratta"
frames, named after a Roman painter. These frames have a hollow concave
centre, bordered by an outer moulding and a smaller moulding near the
sight edge and a continuous run of acanthus, shield, ribbon and pin motifs.
Lorenzelli's laborious treatment essentially involved stripping the frames
of all the overpainted areas, dissecting the sections and methodically
cleaning and priming them with successive layers before rejoining the
parts.
At the inauguration of the January exhibition
by British High Commissioner to India Rob Young, special invitee Viren
J. Shah, the governor of West Bengal, said the tercentenary merrymaking
was "more than just an excuse for receptions and speeches".
But with the CTT's funds depleted (they had raised close to £500,000
or around Rs 3.5 crore) and with the bulk of the restoration still unfinished,
the trust is looking for more donors and benefactors. "Hopefully
this is only a semi-colon and not a full stop," says Vaughan. Most
Kolkatans would be holding the same hope.
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