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‘An endless variety of forms and proportions’: Indian influence on British gardens and garden buildings, c.1760-c.1865
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James, Diane Evelyn Trenchard (2019) ‘An endless variety of forms and proportions’: Indian influence on British gardens and garden buildings, c.1760-c.1865. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3493192~S15
Abstract
This thesis examines the short-lived development of Indian design in British architecture and gardens between c.1760 and c.1865, coinciding with the height of the trading and territorial ambition of the East India Company and the return of military officers and government officials from India to Great Britain and Ireland. Although only a relatively small number of gardens and houses in rural counties were built with elements of Indian onion domes, chhajja cornices, minarets, or temple pools, their presence within – as well as absence from – the British countryside is indicative of the careers, aspirations and motivations of those involved (both directly and less directly) with empire, as well as of the controversial position which they often occupied in political and social spheres.
The thesis demonstrates that ‘nabobery’ is only one of the appropriate lenses through which to analyse Indian design in British gardens and architecture in this period. The first chapter explores ways in which East India Company returnees established domestic roots via various building and landscaping projects as they endeavoured to re-join British society, though not as a homogenous group of ‘nabobs’, but as individuals manifesting their personal motivations and concerns. The second chapter examines how returnees, who had spent many years in India’s interior, researching, collecting, and painting Indian art and architecture as an integral part of their Company work or leisure activities, used their scholarship to memorialise India in more modest houses and gardens. The last chapter establishes how views of India’s landscapes were used by architects, landscapers and patrons with no previous contact with India, adapting Indian design and imbuing it with new significance and meaning. Through new scholarly research across nine case studies, the thesis therefore illuminates a variety of practices and motivations underpinning the aesthetics of the Indian-influenced garden and architecture in the period.
| Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BH Aesthetics N Fine Arts > NA Architecture S Agriculture > SB Plant culture T Technology > TH Building construction |
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| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Gardens, English -- Indic influences, Architecture -- Great Britain -- Indic influences, Garden structures -- Great Britain -- Indic influences, Aesthetics, Indic. | ||||
| Official Date: | September 2019 | ||||
| Dates: |
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| Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
| Theses Department: | Department of History of Art | ||||
| Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
| Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
| Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Dias, Rosie, 1975- | ||||
| Sponsors: | Arts and Humanities Research Board (Great Britain) | ||||
| Format of File: | |||||
| Extent: | xxxviii, 348 leaves | ||||
| Language: | eng |
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