On the ceiling!!!

Posted by Kaddy (Mumbai, India) on 28 January 2008 in Art & Design.

Since the discovery of the abandoned caves in 1819 by a British army officer out on a hunting trip in the mountains of Maharashtra, scholars were quick to recognise the importance of the caves and were aware that the exposure of the paintings, after lying in secluded darkness for hundreds of years, was leading to their rapid deterioration. With a view to preserving these images several attempts were subsequently made to produce facsimile copies.

The copies in the V&A were produced between 1844 and 1885 under two separate initiatives. Major Robert Gill, commissioned by the Royal Asiatic Society, was stationed at this remote setting from 1844 to 1863 and painted about 30 large scale canvases. Displayed in the Indian Court of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, most were destroyed in a fire there in 1866, leaving only four surviving examples. The importance of the project was such that in 1872 the Government of Bombay commissioned John Griffiths, the principle of the Bombay School of Art and his students to make a new set of copies. It took 13 years to complete the project at a cost of £30,000. Three hundred paintings were shipped to London, and many were put on display at the Imperial Institute (current site of Imperial College) alongside the vast collection of Indian objects now housed at the V&A. However, in June 1885 disaster struck once again and another fire in one of the stores in the institute destroyed well over a hundred canvases.

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