Ruins of the Palace, Madura [Madurai]

This image depicts the ruins of the palace at Madurai, the oldest city in India. The palace itself was erected in 1636, and is represented here against a new, British-built structure that constitutes the background of the painting.

The ruins of an elaborate entrance to the Palace at Madurai dominate the left register of the picture plane. Intricate stonework and molding decorates the inside of the edifice, while the outside is crumbling and has been over-run with moss and hanging plants. Two bulls graze to the left of this structure. Newer buildings can be seen through the gaping hole in the ruin, as well as the figure of a man holding what appears to be a rifle. The rocky ground slopes gently upward to the left from the right corner of the canvas, and on the hill the Daniell party can be seen at work under a large parasol. They themselves become a part of a picturesque scene as they sketch the appealing but otherwise incomprehensible ruins of Madurai. In the far right corner, barely visible to the naked eye, are two figures seemingly dressed in the fashion of the Indian natives. They are standing before a part of the palace that is in much better condition than the principle edifice.

The composition of Thomas Daniell’s Ruins of the Palace, Madura not only layers the past upon the present by cleverly creating a view of the presumably new and British-built structure through the gaping and crumbling arch of the Hindu palace, but also layers the familiar upon the exotic or foreign by inserting a group of European tourists (the artist himself included) into the Indian hillside. This image is also significant for its depiction of British imperialism. This view of the old Hindu civilization that the British (and the Moghuls before them) have displaced suggests the theme of British progress in Madras and other parts of India. By placing himself and his party in the scene—as well as the distant figure seen through the crumbling archwaye—Daniell inserts British influence into the Hindu past, implying that the old civilization is now presided over and protected by the new, British one. The grazing bulls featured in the left register of the painting, positioned at an almost perfect diagonal from the painter and his party, present a more pastoral or domesticated version of the Hindu idol, the Great Bull, whose shrine at Tanjore is the subject of another Daniell print. 

The British presence increased exponentially in India during the late eighteenth century and afterwards, initially in the form of implicit government support for the commercial and political power of the East India Company and eventually as an explicitly imperial presence. The East India Company, founded in the seventeenth century, primarily aimed to establish trade with India, but soon became interested in acquiring territory as well. After a power shift in India, the East India Company gradually extended British rule over the territories, facilitating trade with the rest of Asia (Trotter 13). Artists like Daniell depicted these regions and so provided the British population with views of the otherwise unfamiliar, distant lands of the British Empire (De Almeida 183-99).

Thomas Daniell and his nephew, William, first traveled to India in 1784. A relatively unknown artist, Daniell was drawn to the Indian landscape as an opportunity to explore the new categories of “the sublime,” “the picturesque,” and “the exotic” that were becoming valued in art and were constantly being refined and redefined by English artists. He also hoped to find employment abroad, as the British domestic art market was being flooded with landscape painters. According to the terms of his agreement with the East India Company, whose Court of Directors agreed to commission both Daniell and his nephew, Daniell was required “to publish twelve views of Calcutta at twelve gold Mohurs the set, from complete plates and finished watercolours,” a contract that was advertised in the Calcutta Chronicle on 17 July 1786 and later on 4 January 1787. After finishing the views of Calcutta, the Daniells embarked on a tour of the upper-country, a trip that may have been catalyzed by William Hodges’s Select Views, a collection of Indian landscapes that not only gave Daniell a clear idea of how his work could be used, but also fueled his desire to “outdo” Hodges by finding “the tombs, mosques, temples, and picturesque scenes that he had depicted and to make a more impressive and more accurate record of those same places” (Archer 37).
 

Thomas Daniell was one of the first Europeans to travel extensively in and document India, gaining him a reputation as the "artist-adventurer." While there, he and his nephew created hundreds of drawings and watercolors, depicting Mughal and Dravidian monuments, Indian architecture and culture, cityscapes, and sublime views of mountains and waterfalls. These works were popular among both European and Indian patrons. From his drawings, Daniell published Oriental Scenery in 1795: containing 144 hand-colored aquatint views of India, it was widely admired for its color-printed documentation of the country and its culture (De Almeida 105, 183-85). It gave a glimpse of the eastern world to Europeans, who were interested in this far-off land and its exotic nature. This desire for familiarity with foreign places was part of the general trend towards inquiry and research initiated in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and included a renewed interest in antiquities and ruins (Archer 12). The ruins depicted in the work contribute to an orientalist way of talking about India, not only by supporting a stereotypical view of India's vibrant, exotic culture, but also by construing Indian history as idyllic and pastoral. Consequently, the popularity of Daniell's work was promulgated by those who, fascinated by the distant and exotic East, hoped to follow his example by traveling to “record and then take possession of the new British India” (De Almeida 184).