ARTICLE
Fraser Album
The group of paintings which comprise the Fraser Album today were discovered amongst the Fraser Papers in 1979. The papers offer detailed information about the commissioned artists, the sites and scenes they sought to depict, as well as the motivations of the brothers — such as the 1815 drawings of Gurkha soldiers that were commissioned by James to use them as models and figures in landscape drawings that he intended to publish as aquatints. The album marks a shift in the painting culture of Delhi which, until then, recorded only courtly subjects rendered in a formalised manner. In contrast, the expanse of the Fraser Album across the courtly and the quotidian, the rural and the urban, gave prominence to more common subjects such as soldiers, ascetics, pastoralists, entertainers and the like.
Bibliography
Archer, Mildred. Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period. Victorian and Albert Museum, London and Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, 1992.
Archer, Mildred and Toby Falk. India Revealed The Art and Adventures of James and William Fraser 1801–1835. London: Cassell, 1989.
Museum With No Frontiers. “Fraser Album Artist: The Bullock-Drawn Carriage of Prince Mirza Babur,” 2021. http://islamicart.museumwnf.org/database_item.php?id=object;EPM;my;Mus21;40;en
Sharma, Yuthika. “Art in Between Empires: Visual Culture & Artistic Knowledge in Late Mughal Delhi 1748–1857.” PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2013. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/161444504.pdf.