gorgeous contributions of India’: Sourcing Colour in the British Empire

Winterbottom and Madeline

Since ancient times, the richly coloured textiles of the Indian subcontinent have been highly prized in the West. From the 17th century East India companies imported these and other luxury goods and raw materials, including dyestuffs and pigments into Europe. The British gained an important foothold in India in 1662, as part of negotiations secured by the marriage of Catherine of Braganza and Charles II. Thereafter the power and influence of the British East India Company steadily grew and expanded until, by the mid-19th century, it controlled large swathes of the subcontinent on behalf of the British government.

The East India Company was a major supporter of the Great Exhibition of 1851; it arranged its magnificent Indian Court. Prominently located around the central chancel of the Crystal Palace, next to Osler & Co.’s famous Crystal Fountain, the Indian Court was one of the largest and most popular in the exhibition. Covering 24,000 square feet, it dwarfed Britain’s other colonial courts. The scale and prominence of the displays reflected the importance of India to the British economy.

The colourful displays of Indian works of arts, crafts and manufactured goods at the Great Exhibition amazed and delighted visitors. They brought Indian objects to the attention of the wider public for the first time. The Indian Court was photographed and a series of coloured lithographs allowed those who could not visit the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park to see it in all its richly coloured glory (fig. 2.8.1). Dominating the displays and no doubt adding to their popularity was an enormous stuffed elephant wearing a golden howdah and trappings. Also on display was the famous Koh-I-Noor diamond, recently presented to Queen Victoria by deposed Emperor Duleep Singh following Britain’s annexation of the Punjab in 1849 — ‘the forfeit of Oriental faithlessness, and the prize of Saxon valour’ according to one reviewer.299 Many British artists, designers and manufacturers were inspired by the objects displayed in the Indian Court: for Charles Lockwood Kipling, father of Rudyard, it sparked a lifelong interest in – and promotion of – the arts and crafts of India. Owen Jones described the 1851 displays as the ‘gorgeous contributions of India’.300

Above all, it was the Indian textiles – with their beautiful combinations of bright colours and stylised patterns – that caught visitors’ attention. Textiles and clothing accounted for seven of the twenty-nine classes of materials exhibited. Indian craftsmen, like others across Asia, were considered by many to have an ‘innate’ sense of colour harmony in art and design. The Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition acknowledged that in ‘the management of colours, the skill with which a number of them are employed, and the taste with which they

In May 1881, the French art critic and collector Théodore Duret visited an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, a private gallery on New Bond Street founded by Sir Coutts Lindsay and directed by Joseph Comyns Carr. In this new venue of the British avant-garde, Duret particularly admired James McNeill Whistler’s Harmony in Grey and Green, Miss Cicely Alexander (fig. 3.1.1) which, he claimed, extolled ‘le charme de la couleur en soi’: the charm of colour for colour’s sake.319 And yet this chromophilia, Duret also noted, had beed the cause of controversy, forcing the painter to wage ‘terrible battles’ against his enemies. This was an allusion to the Ruskin-Whistler trial sparked by the gallery’s first exhibition in 1877, during which Ruskin accused Whistler, in his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket (fig. 3.1.2), of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’.320 For Ruskin, Whistler’s materialist handling of colour – made simpler by the recent invention of collapsible metal tubes (fig. 3.1.3) – had become a way of deceiving the public by pushing art beyond narrative and representation, aiming instead to capture elusive notions of ‘harmonies’ and ‘atmosphere’. Fearing that Ruskin’s comments would damage his reputation, Whistler sued the critic for libel. As Ruskin did not attend the court hearings, the stage was left entirely to Whistler, whose witty defence convinced both audience and jury of the validity of his aesthetics, even if, in the end, he was only awarded a farthing by way of compensation. By spectacularly staging a conflict between aesthetics and morality, the trial revealed the rift between the new avant-gardes and Ruskin’s ideal of ‘Truth to Nature’. The new generation of painters, writers, musicians and designers no longer adhered to the ethical stance of the aging critic, which had shaped public discussions of art for almost half a century. Instead, they celebrated ‘art for art’s sake’ – that is to say, in Whistler’s words, art ‘independent of all clap-trap’, appealing ‘to the artistic sense of eye or ear’ only.321

Whistler believed that in the arts the senses should prevail over any ‘message’ – a stance that was underscored by his decision to call his works ‘Nocturnes’, ‘Arrangements’ and ‘Harmonies’, titles which at the same time gestured towards synaesthesia. Colour, which in itself does not resemble anything, was to play a crucial role in this attempt at freeing art from both representation and morality. Instead of believing, like Ruskin, that hues were ‘sacred’ or ‘sanctifying’, the ‘aesthetes’ – as the new generation called themselves, in order to emphasise the primacy of perception (aesthesis in Greek) in art – selected colours purely for their artistic or sensual effects. As Oscar Wilde put it, the ‘recognition of the primary importance of the sensuous element in art, this love of art for art’s sake, is the point in which we of the younger school have made a departure