A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c16.s9: Section IX. Terra-Cottas and Clay Figures
A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c16.s9
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Section IX. Terra-Cottas and Clay Figures
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The considerable part played by terra-cotta in the evolution of Indian sculpture has not been generally recognized, although Cunningham showed long ago that the early brick temples which preceded stone edifices in many parts of Northern India were decorated with ‘terra-cotta ornaments and alto-rilievos’.¹ The art of handling terra-cotta as a material for works of art has been extinct for centuries, except that it lingered late in a debased form in Bengal; but in the early centuries of the Christian era terra-cotta was considered good enough for friezes, floral ornaments, animal figures, and even statuettes two or three feet in height. Many of the terra-cotta figures at the Bhītargāon brick temple, dating perhaps from the fifth century (*ante*, p. 28), are, as Cunningham observed, ‘boldly designed and well drawn,’ though marred by a tendency to excessive violence in the expression of movement and consequent liability to lapse into grotesqueness. The fragile nature of the material naturally causes a dearth of good specimens, and little attention has been paid to those few which survive. A single plate (LXXXIV) must suffice for the illustration of this ancient and forgotten form of art. The Graeco-Persian head from Sārnāth dating from the Maurya period (Plate LXXXIV, Fig. A) has been published by Mr. Marshall in *J. R. A. S.*, 1908, Plate IV, 6.
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¹ *A. S. Rep.*, vol. xi, p. 42. See also in same volume, pp. 21, 35, 44, 52, 53; and vol. xii, pp. 47–50. M. Migeon considers terra-cotta to be the primitive mode of expression of the sculptor’s art: ‘objets exécutés en bronze, qui, pour être ainsi réalisés, ont dû être précédés d’ébauches en terre cuite, premières expressions de la pensée du sculpteur’ (*Manuel d’Art Musulman*, t. II, p. 61).
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FIG. A. Tortoise.
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FIG. B. Krishna.
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The preference commonly felt by modern European artists for realistic as compared with idealistic art finds frank expression in Mr. Percy Brown’s dictum that ‘the very highest form of fine art in India is to be met with in the terra-cotta statuettes made in Lucknow’.² This verdict is supported by reproductions of some terribly realistic figures of the victims of famine made for the Delhi Exhibition by Bhagwān Singh of Lucknow, ‘a modeller by caste and an artist by instinct,’ which the kindness of Sir G. Watt enables me to republish from the negative supplied by him (Pl. LXXXV). Not only do these figures image accurately the horrible facts as I have seen them, but they do something more, and suggest with moving vividness the emotions and sufferings hidden behind the visible physical appearances. The effigy of the skeleton son carrying the skeleton father pick-a-back opens up to the eye of imagination the whole sad story of extremest misery sanctified by intensest filial piety, and the other figures are hardly less suggestive of unrecorded tragedy. The man who could model forms so adequately expressive of the deepest emotions was no mean artist, and it is strange that he should have been content to waste his genius on petty, unregarded clay images, which, in all probability, have been ground to dust long ago, and would have been, like himself, utterly forgotten, but for the chance which enshrined them in an Exhibition catalogue. A philosophical Hindu, perhaps, would say that Bhagwān Singh deserved to be forgotten as a fit penalty for his realism. To the European he seems to be a lost spirit, who, in happier surroundings, might have become the founder of a school of sculptors and heir to undying fame. Images, like books, *habent sua fata*.
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² *Indian Art at Delhi*, p. 450.
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[Figure: FIG. A. Classical head of Maurya period from Sārnāth. (A. S. photo, supplied by Prof. Macdonell.)]
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[Figure: FIG. B. Ornament from Mathurā, 14″ × 8″. (Cunningham, *A. S. Rep.*, xi, Pl. XVIII, 1.)]
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[Figure: FIG. C. Ditto from Nēwal, Cawnpore District, 14″ × 7½″. (Ibid., Fig. 2.)]
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[Figure: FIG. D. Panel, Vishnu, &c., from Bhītargāon, Cawnpore District, 19″ × 9½″. (Ibid., Pl. XVII.)]
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[Figure: PLATE LXXXV. Famine; clay figures by Bhagwān Singh of Lucknow. (From a negative lent by Sir G. Watt, K.C.I.E.)]