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The painter had been in
India some 200 years ago, and had published edition after edition of
his works, first in India and then in France, but by this time, he had
been forgotten. Professor Hardgrave chanced upon his work in San
Francisco through a friend and, seeing something special in it, set
about — with passion and clarity of vision — acquiring every
original etching of the painter and getting down to publishing it. The
publications came after I had left Austin but, as I could see it, they
were all but poised. "The Solvyns Project’ was round the
corner.
But to know a little about the painter and his ‘plans’, first. Francois Balthazar Solvyns, Flemish of origin, was born at Antwerp in 1760. As he grew up in a merchant family, he became what can be called a ‘marine painter’, serving the Austrian state, since where he lived was a part of the Austrian Netherlands then. Things seemed to go fairly well for him but the violent convulsions that overtook Europe suddenly in 1789 — the French Revolution and what followed thereafter — were, perhaps, a bit too much for him. He decided to travel and picked India, then increasingly under the British domination and a land as exotic from a distance as a painter might have wanted, as his destination. In 1791, he landed in Calcutta, settled in, and began to observe the new world around him while making his living doing odds and ends of painterly work. But truly, as a painter, what he saw of the land must have appeared to him endlessly fascinating, with its bewildering variety of people and places and customs and manners, and he seems to have made up his mind to ‘document’ everything. He was obviously aware that other European artists had been working in India before him but he decided to proceed differently, and apparently conceived the idea of recording everything very methodically, step by step, theme by theme. Calcutta was his place and Bengal, in general, his field. But whatever Solvyns observed there, he converted into images. He must have been an untiring worker, for by 1796, he was ready with an extensive publication: A Collection of Two Hundred and Fifty Coloured Etchings: Descriptive of the Manners, Customs and Dresses of the Hindoos. It was a limited edition, but three years later, he published it again in 1799. Clearly, there was a demand for this kind of work, because he, a European, was doing what the officers and servants of the East India Company were engaging Indian painters to do for them: create a record that generally goes by the name of ‘Company Painting’ now. But consider what Solvyns kept doing over the years. If there were all around him strange musical instruments that the natives had devised or were using, he documented these one by one: thus, sankha, ghanta, kansar, tambura, bin, pinak, sitar, sarangi, sarinda, amrti, oorni, dhak, dhol, khol, dholak, tabla, joorghaje, tikara, pakhavaj, nagara, kara, dampha, doira, jagajhampa, surmandal, khanjari, kartal, kansi, jaltarang, manjira, jhanjhari, Ramsinga, bank, surnai, tobrie, Bbnsi, bhoranga. The spellings are all his, based on the Bengali words he must have heard as spoken, but one can recognise the objects because he treated not only of the instruments singly but also, in each case, a person playing it so that one gets a very fair sense of how it was held and played. A number of these instruments have even disappeared today, or at least, gone into oblivion, and this makes Solvyns’ documentation invaluable. These etchings based upon musical instruments were among the first that Robert Hardgrave decided to publish together with a colleague of his, an ethnomusicologist, from the University at Austin. But this, as far as Solvyns oeuvre is concerned, is only the tip of the iceberg, for there is more, much more, that what he produced. The infinite variety of castes and professions, modes of conveyance and religious ceremonies, flora and fauna, fakirs and sadhus, were all grist to his artistic mill. It is as if he was out to create an encyclopaedic record. Solvyns was not a great draughtsman and his drawings or his portraits can be faulted. But his observation was sharp and his curiosity inexhaustible. What is more, he kept adding notes to his etchings, making the images accessible to those who had never laid eyes either upon such people or those objects, even to us across 200 years or more of time. Consider thus, this description of a ‘Puckimar, or Bird Catcher", translated from its original French. "Their method of catching birds is by means of bird lime put on the point of long sticks in joints like fishing rods, which they artfully contrive to insinuate through the leaves and branches of a tree so as not to alarm the birds till it is too late to escape. In taking water fowl, they place a large earthen pot over their heads, and swim very slowly until they get amongst their destined victims, which they drag by their legs under the water, and by such means will secure many before an alarm be given." Who, among those that take interest in these matters or such images, would not find this intriguing, one might ask oneself? Solvyns’ efforts at turning his publication of etchings into a commercial success in his own lifetime — he died in 1824 in his native town — were not eminently successful. But recently, his work has, deservedly, got a second wind as it were, through having been published more than once, most recently in the form of a selection under the title The Costume of Hindustan. One can be superior and designate his work ‘Art as Information’, or one can see it in terms of its own day and its declared intent.
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