Man in an Indian Landscape

Maker Tilly Kettle (British, 1735-1786)

Collections

British Paintings

ClassificationsPAINTINGS

Dateca. 1773

Mediumoil on canvas

Dimensions50 x 39 1/2 in. (127 x 100.3 cm.)

DescriptionStanding three-quarter length in an open landscape, proper left arm akimbo, proper right arm leaning on a plinth, face turned three-quarters right. Dressed in bright blue suit with brass buttons, white neckcloth and white lace at collar and cuffs. Brown hair is thinning on top and full about the ears. Foliage and trunk of tree to left of painting behind plinth. River or lake in middle ground, trees and pavilion in background.

Credit LineThe Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

Label TextThe identity of the sitter is unknown.

Acquired as a portrait of the Whig politician Charles James Fox by Johann Zoffany, this painting has been reattributed to Kettle on the evidence of style. Moreover, although the dark, bushy eyebrows, prominent nose, and full lips create a slight resemblance to Fox, his identification as sitter has been discounted on the grounds that the portrait was very likely executed in India (as discussed below). The identity of the man in this portrait therefore remains undetermined.
Kettle journeyed to Bombay in 1769, the first important English artist to seek his fortune in India. According to an amateur painter resident in Calcutta in December 1770, it was a very profitable business, with native and expatriate patrons willing to pay huge prices. The present portrait was probably executed midway through Kettle's seven-year sojourn. The manner of dress is virtually identical to that worn by the left-hand figures in Kettle's double portrait Capt. John Sealy and Charles Sealy, signed and dated 1773. The subject wears a frock coat with a stock about his neck and the ruffle of what appear to be very fine French lace cuffs emerging from his tight sleeves. The vest is partly fastened with oversized buttons stamped with a quartered design, known as death's head buttons. The blue of the coat would be considered rather bright in England, but Englishmen in India favored more vibrant colors than they would have dared to wear at home. The hairstyle, too, recurs in portraits made of European men in India; it is the sitter's own hair, cut in a very short fringe across the forehead.
The setting of the portrait provides further confirmation of the Indian context. As Judy Egerton has pointed out, the vegetation at left and the architectural structure glimpsed in the right distance are inappropriate to England, but resemble details often found in English representations of India. Indeed, the trailing tendrils snaking around the tree trunk (which resembles the drooping roots of a banyan tree), together with the stone plinth in front of it, can also be found in Kettle's portrait of the Rt. Hon. Edward Golding of c.1774-75. The building in the right distance is the sort of marble baradari, or pavilion surrounded by pillars, employed for Indian palaces and the "bungalows" of many British residents of India.
Despite such allusions to the sitter's exotic location, Kettle's portrait of an Englishman in India emphasizes continuity with home traditions. The setting adapts foreign flora, terrain, and architecture to the formal conventions of English landscape design, while the sitter himself is presented in a casually confident pose that recurs in British portraiture from the seventeenth century on. The portrait provides a revealing insight into eighteenth-century colonialism, illustrating the irresistible tendency of British artists to impose their own culture on images of India.

Status

Not on view

Object number53.3