Estelle Morris Defers Export Licence On Rare Album Of Watercolours By James Baillie Fraser
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Arts Minister, Estelle Morris, has placed a temporary export bar on a rare, complete and intact album of twenty-four watercolours, Views of Calcutta, by James Baillie Fraser. This will provide a last chance to raise the money to keep one of the finest series of watercolours by a British artist done in the east in the United Kingdom.
The Minister's ruling follows a recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art that the export decision be deferred. This reflects the pictures' outstanding significance for the study of Calcutta life in the early 19th century, and the processes by which such drawings were turned into aquatints, as the album remains the only instance where Fraser's original watercolours still exist.
The deferral will enable purchase offers to be made at the following agreed fair market price:
An album of twenty-four watercolours, Views of Calcutta, by James Baillie Fraser, deferred at the recommended price of £253,663.75, until after 16 November 2004 with the possibility of an extension until after 16 January 2005 if there is a serious intention to raise funds with a view to making an offer to purchase.
Anyone interested in making an offer to purchase the album should contact the owner's agent through:
The Secretary
The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art
Department for Culture, Media and Sport
2-4 Cockspur Street
London SW1Y 5DH
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Notes to Editors
1. Pictures of this item can be downloaded free of charge from our site on PA Picselect. Please go to the DCMS folder situated within the Arts section of Picselect either at www.papicselect.com or through the PA bulletin board.
2. James Baillie Fraser's views of Calcutta document the topography of British Calcutta in the early 19th century and demonstrate the city's role as the centre of the political, commercial and religious life of British India.
3. British control of the vast Indian market was one of the foundations of British economic expansion in the 19th century and hence a cornerstone of British social and cultural life. Calcutta was at the centre of British political and commercial interests in India, the seat of the Governor-General, and the headquarters of a large number of commercial and business firms. Fraser's album of views of the city is by far the finest known such series of original drawings and furnishes evocative and very rare documentation of the city at a time of confident British imperial expansion.
4. The eldest son of an impoverished Scottish family, Fraser went to India to try to recoup the family fortunes not in the normal way as the protégé of a Director of the East India Company securing entry into the civil service (no longer then a guarantee of an immense fortune), but as a businessman in Calcutta with other Scotsmen. In this career he was not very successful, and his visit to Delhi 1815-16 to see his brother William (in the East India Company's service and effectively Commissioner for the Delhi Territory) further alienated him from his chosen profession. Both brothers went off campaigning in the Himalayan foothills during the Anglo-Nepal War, during which time William Fraser recruited the first Gurkha irregulars into British service. James Fraser concentrated on his drawings of the mountainous scenery, and began to collect and commission drawings from Indian artists of the local people both in the mountains and, on the conclusion of the war, around Delhi. His collection of early 19th century Delhi paintings was the finest known; it was dispersed in a series of sales in the 1980s.
5. After his return to Calcutta, James Fraser studied with William Havell (in India 1817-19), who taught him the use of gouache to deepen his colouring, and he worked up his Himalayan drawings with a view to publication as aquatints in London. After Havell's departure in 1819, Fraser worked in Calcutta with George Chinnery for a while. He was however already too much his own man to fall greatly for Chinnery's style, but found valuable his criticism of his oil paintings as well as that of the series of views of Calcutta which now engaged him. He had already decided to return to Scotland, and in the year before his departure Fraser began seriously to make drawings of his surroundings, with a view to having them published in London like his Himalayan views.
6. Fraser's views of Calcutta show the newly built imperial city, the capital of a vastly increased British India, in a very different guise from the earlier published views by Thomas Daniell which were taken in the 1780s and 1790s. Since then, Calcutta had experienced the magnificence of the Marquess Wellesley as Governor-General (1798-1805), and Fraser's views accordingly are centred round the palace which Wellesley had built as a symbol of British power in India, representative of the greatly expanded empire which Wellesley had created. The creation of the new Government House had also enabled the laying out of a political centre in a rational Georgian manner, which Fraser's long vistas closed by substantial monuments emphasise.
7. Fraser as a businessman was also mindful of Calcutta's commercial interests, represented here by views of the river with its immense quantity of shipping and of some of the principal commercial streets, both British and Bengali. Other aspects of Calcutta's life are represented by views of the newly created St John's Cathedral, of the principal Presbyterian, Catholic and Hindu places of worship within the city, and of its educational and scientific establishments. In its streets we are treated to rich vignettes of the local population and their occupations, both British and Indian. In short, this series of drawings sums up the city's life.
8. Ten years ago Fraser's album was discovered in the library at Longleat House. It had arrived there in the 20th century with the library of Beriah Botfield, formed in England in the first half of the 19th century. It is in superb condition, with just the one inscription on the flyleaf: 'Calcutta Views Fraser Original Drawings' by presumably Botfield, and with titles to the drawings pencilled on the reverse of each album page (watermarked 1829) on which the drawings are mounted. The whole album seems to have been put together about 1830. Fraser no doubt parted with them as his family were perpetually short of money.
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