A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c20.s3.17

c20.s3.17

Indian artists never acquired the Chinese passionate love of landscape for its own sake (*ante*, p. 450). To them the scenery was of interest only in its relation to human beings as a background on which to exhibit the actions of men and women. At first they were content with the purely conventional scenery of the Persian school, but the later painters, obviously under the influence of European example, attempted, and sometimes with considerable success, to treat the background as a subject of more or less independent interest, and to paint elaborate scenes filled with hills, streams, and buildings treated in a realistic way. But the result of such a combination of European and Asiatic practice has never been quite satisfactory.