Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c7.49

c7.49

This is the situation which the Government Schools of Art, established in India for the last fifty years, have had to face. On the assumption that Indian painting and sculpture have never found a much higher degree of poetic expression than that represented by pure ornament—or the stage reached by all uncivilised and uncultivated races—it would seem that the usual European system of art-teaching is entirely reasonable and logical in India. On the other hand, if there really has been for 5,000 years this remarkable hiatus in the Indian intellect, which the European assumes and the English-educated Indian accepts without question, the work of English artists who may have charge of these schools will always be peculiarly dreary and unprofitable; for, though the technique of drawing, painting, and sculpture can be acquired by almost any average intelligence through diligence and perseverance, mere proficiency in technique will no more produce artists than practice in rhyming will create poets. When, therefore, in 1896 I took charge of the Calcutta Government Art Gallery, which up to that time had contained only a very mediocre and miscellaneous collection of European pictures, I began an attempt to place the study of Indian art upon a proper footing by arranging a collection of Indian ornament, architecture, painting, and sculpture in proper correlation as a connected whole, thus completing the curious truncated pyramid usually exhibited to the world as the art of India.