Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c12.182

c12.182

In every department of original thought, the poverty of modern India, compared with the great epochs of its former history, reveals the effect of our "sterilisation of the intellectual seed-plot," but nowhere is this more evident than in the field of fine art. The schools of art, in their teaching of painting and sculpture, continue even to the present day to uphold the Anglo-Indian dogma that India has always failed in the higher expression of artistic thought, except when, as Mr. Vincent Smith put it, "Indian art was held in Græco-Roman leading-strings." Consequently, the whole paraphernalia of European art-academies—the drawing copies, casts from "the antique," the five orders of classic architecture, Gothic mouldings, etc., etc., have been imported wholesale from Europe, to form the basis of the Indian art-student's training; and, at the same time, it has been held to be totally unnecessary, if not demoralising, for them to study the principles and methods of Indian painting and sculpture.