[Original caption, Verso] “Watching the Pageant, Delhi. The great Delhi Durbar is known by means of the vernacular press to the inhabitants of the remotest parts of India.
A interesting very early lithographic card from Bombay by the little-known city artist/publisher W. Cooper, who seems to have specialized in the risque postcard (the same woman seems to be the model for A Trysting Place).
A very evocative studio portrait of three – instead of the usual single - ayah which, intentionally or not, hints at something of the pathos of their work.
[Original caption] A Belle of Northern India. The women of Delhi and district are, to Western eyes, rather more pleasing than those of many other parts of India.
A postcard that shows off the great detail achievable in the collotype printing process. Made from a photography from by the photographer Fred Bremner of Lahore and Quetta, the reproduced image owes its ability to reproduce the detail of the…
One of those postcards which remind you what an exceptional artist M.V. Dhurandhar was. In the midst of a harvest, with giant sheaves of the crop as if pulled apart like curtains, stands a woman in red with sickle in hand.
Clare Harris in her book Photography and Tibet (Reaktion Books, 2016) writes of this postcard, "a portrait of a young woman that features prominently in The Buddhism of Tibet as a generic illustration of Tibetan femininity implies that she'd been…
Early postcards from the Malabar Coast are uncommon. This one from Nicolas Brothers, a firm set up in Madras in the 1860s which later opened a branch in Calicut, still bears the rounded frame on top once popular on albumen photographs, opening an…
This postcard shows a nanny with a pram on the “Queen’s necklace” of Malabar beach in Bombay. The artist Dhurandhar and other fellow J.J. School of Art students spent much time here sketching the many urban types who were drawn to this new social…
