Edwin Lord Weeks, painter and explorer

A highlight of Weeks's Indian trip in 1886 and 1887 was a visit to Jodhpur. The enormous old palace there provided the background for his Salon offering in 1888, A Rajah of Jodhpur (P1. VII). Notwithstanding its magnificent scale, Weeks typically chose to focus on an event of no real importance--the rajah dismounting from his elephant--and it is in part by relating the pomp and magnificence by which even insignificant things were carried out that he was able to instill in his scenes an air of foreignness and wonder. It is not certain that he ever witnessed the event he depicted. More likely the painting is a composite of impressions and events Weeks experienced during his stays in India. He recalled seeing the rajah of Jodhpur twice, but never in this context. Once the rajah was dressed in English sporting plaids in India, and once he was in a carriage in London dressed in his native costume, bejeweled and "blazing with diamonds." (22)

Along the same lines but even more elaborate in its rendering is The Arrival of Prince Humbert, the Rajah, at the Palace of Amber (P1. IX). The scene is a tour de force of extravagant pageantry, combining the elaborate architecture of the palace with a breathtaking display of ornament and color in the costumes and paraphernalia of the royal retinue.

Weeks's attention to architectural detail and profound interest in Indian monuments are enduring characteristics of his work both as an artist and a writer. His convincing architectural contexts contribute greatly to the believability of his scenes. However, his unadorned architectural studies, like one he made of the courtyard of the Amber Palace, (23) often suggest a deserted stage waiting for a company of players.

The difference between the studies Weeks painted in situ and his finished studio paintings makes clear that he was not providing the viewer with travel documentation alone but with exhilarating theater as well. Weeks's writings are full of references to the sensations of theatricality and unreality he often felt in India, and the sensation of being transported back in time by his surroundings. On his way to Amber, the abandoned capital of Rajasthan, Weeks transferred from his carriage to a waiting elephant, commenting that the slow majesty of the beast seemed to aid and give a touch of reality to the impression that we were leaving the present and going backward into the past....The deserted city [of Amber], lying along the gorge at the foot of the cliffs, does not give one so much the impression of a once populous capital that has been abandoned forever as of a place where the people had fallen asleep, and one would not be at all surprised to see them pour out from the house doors in the "painted streets" and throng the empty bazars and temple courts, or to hear again the din of metalworkers in the silent shops. (24)

Describing the courtyard in one of the lakeside palaces at Udaipur, Weeks imagined it a perfect setting for an eastern drama by the popular French dramatist Victorien Sardou (1831-1908):