A Splendid Portrayal of Indian Birds
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India has among its more than 1200 species some of the most beautiful birds in the world, and they have long attracted artists in the portrayal of their "splendid plumage." For the Mughal court, Indian painters provided brilliant natural history drawings and miniatures, and in the late 18th and early 19th century, British officials, as they extended their presence in India, recruited Indian artists in scientific investigation and depiction of Indian fauna--and none more richly than birds. Many of the British civil servants were themselves amateur artists of considerable ability and a good number were passionate ornithologists. The result was a phenomenal collection of paintings and drawings of Indian birds and a large number of often sumptuous volumes of prints portraying the birds of India and the subcontinent. Jagmohan Mahajan opens Splendid Plumage: Indian Birds by British Artists with an illuminating essay on the history of British ornithology in India and on the collections of paintings and prints that came out of the British encounter with avian life in India. The greater portion of the book is devoted to 60 full-page color plates reproducing watercolors and prints from some of the finest of these collections. These include previously unpublished watercolors by Christopher Webb Smith, c. 1830, and representative prints from James Forbes's Oriental Memoirs (1813), John Edward Gray's Illustrations of Indian Zoology (1830-35), John Gould's A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (1830-33), and Allan Octavian Hume and C. H. T. Marshall's The Game Birds of India, Burmah, and Ceylon (1879-81), among others. Splendid Plumage is handsomely produced and will be richly rewarding to anyone interested in the birds of India and, more generally, in artists' portrayal of birds.
