The Solvyns Project

"BALTHAZAR SOLVYNS's life is itself fascinating, and his portrayal of India constitutes an unrivaled visual account of the people of Bengal in the late eighteenth century. The prints in themselves are of importance in a tradition reaching back to the early seventeenth century, and even earlier, with encyclopedic efforts to represent systematically both the unfamiliar, as in costumes of foreign lands, and the familiar, as in the typologies of peasants, craftsmen, and street vendors. In portraying the Hindus, however, Solvyns is not simply recording ethnographic types. He gives his figures individual character and places them in time and space, with narrative interest, and in doing so, he provides the viewer intimate access. This separates him from purely encyclopedic interest, for with artistic purpose he combines the ethnographic and the aesthetic. He conveys "art as information."
As an artist, Solvyns provided a prototype for the genre of "Company School" paintings of occupations, done by Indian artists for the British, that became popular in the early nineteenth century. But more significantly from an historical and social perspective, Solvyns's work, with its accompanying descriptions, constitutes "the first great ethnographic survey of life in Bengal." Moreover, in his ordered, hierarchical portrayal of Hindu castes in Bengal, however problematic it may be, Solvyns may well be the first European to provide a systematic ranking of castes. Yet this contribution has never been recognized, and historians and anthropologists have rarely drawn upon Solvyns for an understanding of society in Bengal in the late eighteenth century.
I first encountered Solvyns in the summer of 1966 in San Francisco, when my friend Francis (Frank) Hutchins told me of some individual etchings he had seen in a shop that specialized in Indian miniatures. I was immediately attracted to them, as here was an artist genuinely interested in the people of India It was only later that I was able to identify Solvyns as the artist, and there was little information available about him. My fascination with Solvyns led me as a collector in quest of the full, unbroken sets of the Calcutta and Paris etchings. I was fortunate to acquire the Paris edition, Les Hindoûs, from a London dealer in the early 1970s. Although the bindings for the four volumes were tattered, the prints were in immaculate condition. A little more than a decade later, again in England, I acquired the Calcutta prints, with the 1799 title page and in original leather binding."
- Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr.
The University of Texas at Austin The Flemish artist François Balthazar Solvyns (1760-1824), who lived in Calcutta from 1791 to 1803, is little known, but his collection of etchings of the Hindus provide a rich and compelling portrait of India two hundred years ago. ...