From a painting by Mortimer Menpes, a prominent Australian painter settled in England, this postcard was used in part to advertise the book India by Flora A. Steel (1905) which included illustrations by Menpes based on his 1902-03 trip to the subcontinent. Menpes, who was intimately involved in printing and paper technologies, often on behalf of the great painter James Whistler with whom he was close friends, made some of the finest artist-signed postcards of India, often from unusual perspectives like this one.
He once wrote: "India surpassed my wildest expectations; the scenes I saw fired my brain, quickened my pulses, and filled my soul with a mad and eager longing to paint, paint, paint, paint, now and at once." (World Pictures, p. 207).