Transporting of materials from Jabbalpur to Sanchi, by an anonymous artist, oil on canvas, 1870-74, India

Transporting of materials from Jabbalpur to Sanchi, by an anonymous artist, oil on canvas, 1870-74, India

This painting, and its two companions (IPN.903, 09200(IS)), must have been painted at some time between January 1870 and 1874, but none appears in the Museum's records. Since they were on display in the South Kensington Museum in 1874 at the latest, they might conceivably have been lent by the India Museum and then have been officially acquired when the India Museum's collection was dispersed.

Historical significance: In his Catalogue of the Objects of Indian Art exhibited in the South Kensington Museum (London, 1874), footnote on pp.13-14, Henry Hardy Cole writes:

In the large South Court of the Kensington Museum may be seen a plaster facsimile of the eastern gateway of the Sanchi Tope, together with painted illustrations of the tope and the mode of conducting the casting operations. [The cast was destroyed in the mid-1950s, when the Indian Museum was pulled down to make way for Imperial College.]
This cast was made in the winter of 1869-70, under my direction…Our party left Calcutta 10th December, 1869, and Jubbulpore on the 13th, where the materials, tools, plaster of Paris, &c., weighing in all 28 tons, were transferred to country carts drawn by bullocks. Sixty carts were procured at Jubbulpore, and on 20th December the march was commenced to Sanchi about 180 miles distant. On 7th January 1870 Sanchi was reached and the work of casting commenced…The painted illustrations, which are exhibited near the gateway, show the positions of the gateways round the tope [09200 (IS)]-of the encampment near the tope [IPN 903]-and of the difficulties besetting the transport of materials, &c., from Jabbalpúr [sic] to Sanchi [IPN 904].

IPN.904