Trade between Europe and India had been established by the time of the Roman Empire, but it wasn’t until European trading companies, including the English East India Company, established outposts on the Indian coast in the early eighteenth century that many Europeans visited the sub-continent. Colonisation by Britain developed from the 1820s until the East India Company was disbanded in favour of direct colonial administration in 1858. From then until independence was achieved in 1947, a succession of predominantly British painters visited. This weekend I show a small selection of their work.

In 1778, William Hodges (1744–1797) travelled to India, where he painted under the patronage of the British statesman Warren Hastings. He stayed in the country for six years, visiting many locations ideal for landscape views. A selection were engraved for his book about his travels in India, published in 1793.

The Marmalong Bridge, with a Sepoy and Natives in the Foreground (c 1783) shows the oldest bridge across the Adyar River in Chennai (formerly Madras), Tamil Nadu, now known as the Maraimalai Adigal Bridge. This was originally constructed by an Armenian merchant in 1728, and wasn’t replaced until 1966.

Several years after his return to Britain, in about 1788, Hodges painted this curious view of the world-famous white marble mausoleum, The Taj Mahal. I suspect this image is slightly on the incline, and the artist set its horizontals more level. But most views of the Taj Mahal show its impressive formal garden; Hodges instead painted it from the opposite bank of the River Yamuna. The mausoleum had only been completed just over a century earlier, in 1648.

Hodges painted this Storm on the Ganges, with Mrs. Hastings near the Col-gon Rocks in about 1790. The Mrs. Hastings of the title was his patron’s wife. She was formerly Mary Buchanan, the widow of one of the victims of the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ incident in 1756.

In 1872, the intrepid natural history painter Edward Lear (1812–1888) set off for India, but only got as far as Suez, where the canal had only been officially opened three years previously. He eventually undertook his tour of India and Sri Lanka in 1873-75, after which he returned to Britain. Although now known almost exclusively for his ‘nonsense’ poetry, Lear was an outstanding artist who survived a troubled childhood and overcame the combination of grand mal epilepsy, asthma, bronchitis, bouts of depression and failing eyesight.

This View of Gwalior, India is allegedly dated 1840, although Lear did not visit India until 1873. It is also painted in oils, which in any case makes it later than about 1852. Gwalior is a major city in northern central India, about 200 miles to the south of Delhi, with a particularly rich range of historic buildings, seen to the left of the large plateau.

Lear’s watercolour of Benares (1873) shows another city in northern central India, to the east of Gwalior, on the banks of the River Ganges. Now better known as Varanasi, it is a religious centre, being the holiest of seven sacred cities of the Hindu and Jain faiths, and an important location in the history of Buddhism as well.

Although undated, I suspect that Lear’s watercolour of Coolies on the Road near Kalicut, Malabar was painted at around this time. Calicut or Kozhikode is a city in the state of Kerala, on the Malibar coast of south-west India, nearly two hundred miles to the west of Bangalore. The city is a major trade centre for locally-produced commodities like pepper, coconut, coffee, and rubber, and the labourers shown here were probably engaged in the production and transport of those products.

My final selection from Lear’s extensive landscape paintings is among his most spectacular, showing the great mountain Kangchenjunga from Darjeeling (1879).

Darjeeling is high in the Lesser Himalaya, at an elevation of just over two thousand metres (over 6,500 feet), in the far north of West Bengal. Famed for its tea plantations, it became a ‘hill station’ for British residents of India in the early nineteenth century, and just a couple of years after Lear painted this view, it was connected by the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway to New Jalpaiguri.

Kangchenjunga is now, and was then, ranked the third highest mountain in the world, with an elevation of 8,586 metres (28,169 feet). Its first successful ascent wasn’t made until 1955; because it is a sacred mountain, teams who attain the summit stop short to avoid its violation. The Kangchenjunga massif is best viewed from Darjeeling, which is about eighty miles away. Kangchenjunga itself is the obviously highest peak, to the left of the centre of the ice-covered massif seen here.

Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin (1842–1904) was another seasoned traveller who was also an accomplished war artist for the Russian Empire. In late 1874 he started an extensive tour of the Himalaya and the Indian sub-continent.

Rajnagar. Marble Embankment Decorated with Bas-Reliefs on a Lake in Udaipur (1874) shows one of the palaces in Udaipur, in Rajasthan. This city is surrounded by seven lakes, several of which have palaces on the shore.

Taj Mahal Mausoleum, Agra (1874-76) is another view of this white marble mausoleum in the city of Agra, built to house the tomb of the Mughal emperor’s favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, between 1632-1653. It’s probably the most painted and photographed building in the whole of the sub-continent.

Vereshchagin returned to Europe in late 1876, where he turned some of his studies into more substantial finished paintings.

Many of his travel paintings are surprisingly small, either completed in front of the motif or in an improvised local studio. This huge painting of the Pearl Mosque, Delhi must have been made entirely in his studio in Paris in 1876-79. The Moti Masjid is built from white marble, and is inside the Red Fort complex in Delhi. It was constructed by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for his second wife and the ladies of the household, in 1659-60.