Exhibition of Balthazar Solvyns’ paintings on colonial Bengal

The first-ever exhibition of the complete series of Les Hindous by Flemish painter Balthazar Solvyns is a portrait of an Indian way of life that has long passed into the pages of history

In the late 17th Century, East India Company galleons sailed up the Bay of Bengal into the waterlogged delta of the Ganges-Brahmaputra and weighed anchor. Legend has it that administrator Job Charnock ‘established’ the city of Calcutta at the site of three extant villages, near the banyan tree where he liked to smoke his hubble-bubble. Over time, Calcutta became the hub for Company trade, the capital of the sub-continent and seat of the province of Bengal. Businessmen and soldiers, artists and memsahibs, all drawn to Bengal’s riches in wealth and culture, flocked to it. Among them was Flemish marine painter, printmaker and ethnographer, Balthazar Solvyns, perhaps the only European artist to have documented the people and material culture of Bengal in the decade he lived there.