WD4496

FRASER, JAMES BAILLIE (1783-1856)

‘Gangotree the holy shrine of Mahadeo’, 1815.

Watercolour heightened with white; 27 by 38.5 cm.

Inscribed in pencil on back of drawing:: ‘The source of the Ganges in the East Indies.’

Provenance: Rathbone Collection, Liverpool; purchased 2003.

Published: J.B. Fraser, ‘Views in the Himala Mountains’, London, 1820, pl. 11; M. Archer and T. Falk ‘India Revealed: the Art and Adventures of James and William Fraser 1801-35,’ London, 1989, pl. 27.

Note: James Baillie Fraser had left Calcutta to visit his brother William in Delhi in 1814, and met up with him in his tour as Political Agent to General Rollo Gillespie in the attack on the Gurkha positions in the Punjab Hills. Once reunited, James began to draw again but thought his initial efforts very crude as he wrote home (Archer and Falk, pp. 23-4). Some of these early views were published in the Himala views, but most were sketched when the two brothers toured the Garhwal and Almora districts after William had been appointed Commissioner for the Affairs of Garhwal in April 1815. By early July William had to go to Srinagar (Garhwal) to install the Raja, while James went off by himself on an adventurous and exhausting expedition to visit the sources of the Jumna and the Ganges. He rejoined his brother at Saharanpur on 29 July, and at once began to work up his sketches, including his view of Gangotri (Archer and Falk, quoting Fraser’s diary, p. 35: ‘began on a fair sheet o paper to copy my sketch of Gangotreee which with 3 or 4 others I mean to present if worthwhile to Lord Moira as specimens of the country’). In 1817 he was reworking his Himalayan views and sending them home where they were engraved as coloured aquatints by both Robert Havells and published by Rodwell and Martin in 1820. Our drawing would seem to be one of the early finished sketches of 1815 rather than the worked up drawings of 1817-19. None of the latter seems to have survived, but the worked-up watercolours of Fraser’s Calcutta’s views of 1819-20, formerly in the library of Longleat House (Christie’s Printed Books and Manuscripts from Longleat, 13 June 2002, lot 89), show the technical perfection which he had achieved by that date. Our drawing is less focused in composition and colouring than the drawing on which the aquatint was based, and considerable changes have been made in the foreground. Two figures only pay their respects to the shrine.