Lord Napier

Lord Napier's address

"..in all schools of painting there is a style which deals with the idea and the allegorical. In this method.. the virtues, the graces, the sciences, the arts, the powers of nature, the heavenly bodies and other abstract conceptions and agencies are clothed in human forms which owe their majesty or their terror to the artist, and which are employed in actions and offices proper to their characters. The painters of Europe in compositions of this nature, have largely employed the apparatus of Greek mythology; but Greece itself cannot supply ideal figures more calculated to enhance of awe the mind than those which adorn the mythology of the Vedic Period of India. In that primitive Pantheon, the powers of nature appear either as seperate Divinities or as attributes of one. The waters which embrace the world, the rain which refreshes and nourishes mankind, the fire which vivifies or consumes, Death which opens his dark mansion to all living beings, the Earth, the Sky, the Seasons, Day, Night and Dawn are all personified and glorified with their proper attributes and functions. In all the portraiture of these powers with their appropriate accessories and duties how vast a filed is opened for the Indian Pencil. The form of Indira, with his attendant breezes hovering over the famished plains of Hindustan, might surely more than rival the triumphant flight of the Italian Aurora with her Galaxy of Hours... Next to the Vedic mythology as a source of Artistic inspiration, come the two legendary epics, the Mahabaratha(sic) and the Ramayana containing the most inexhaustible and diversified stories of pictorial representation which any country possesses. Transfused in detached and episodic forms from the classical original to the vernacular languages of India these forms have become the popular currency of festivity and fancy, of learning and of faith. They are sounded by every musician, they are recited by every school boy, they are sculpted on every temple, they pass before the Raja in his diversions, they are conned by the Brahmin in his books, they are married to the measured labour of the fountain, they are chanted to the cadence of the oar. All that is needed to promulgate their beauty and complete their fame is that in their purer and nobler passages and with the powers of European Art, they should engage the services of the national pencil as they have fastened on the national memory and animated the national voice. "

He also indicated the subjects he would want painted:

"The steps of the village tanks, cattle in rice fields, crowds at religious processions, mourners returning from the place of cremation.. in such scenes the native painters could work in abundant vain"