Beschreibung:

FRASER, James Baillie (1783-1856). Twenty-four highly finished watercolours of views in Calcutta. With scratching-out and bodycolour. [Calcutta: 1819-20] 280 x 430mm each, presumably English paper (watermarks not visible), mounted on card with grey-wash ground. (Small defect to extreme lower right corner of drawings 5, 6 and 16, otherwise in very fine condition, the colours fresh and bright.) Bound and interleaved album (550 x 440mm), green half morocco gilt [by Charles Lewis], free endpapers watermarked J. Whatman 1829, marbled paper sides and endpapers, multiple fillets on corners and spine, lettering in two compartments, CALCUTTA/VIEWS//FRASER./ORIGL DRAWINGS; flyleaves and interleaves: full sheets watermarked "J. Whatman 1829". Provenance : Beriah Botfield, presumably bought from the artist, either directly or through the trade (not in his Payne & Foss acquisitions list). THE COMPLETE SET OF ORIGINAL DRAWINGS, discovered only ten years ago, for the finest and most famous Anglo-Indian colour-plate book published in the late-Georgian period: Views of Calcutta and its environs, from drawings Executed by James B. Fraser, Esq. From Sketches made on the Spot. London: Printed for Rodwell and Martin [from part 4, March 1825 onwards: Printed for Smith, Elder, and Co.] 1824 [-1826] Havell and Co. Printers. The plates were engraved and aquatinted -- to actual size of the watercolour drawings -- by Robert Havell junior, Frederick Christian Lewis and Theodore Fielding, and issued both coloured and uncoloured in eight parts (see Michael Oliver, Travel in Aquatint and Lithography from the Library of J.R. Abbey II, 494). Numerous sons of Scottish landowning families went to India in order to make their fortune in the service of the East India Company, and later the British Raj. Edward Satchwell Fraser (1751-1835), whose Inverness-shire estate, Reelick, was heavily mortgaged, sent all five of his sons to India, including the eldest James Baillie, who would inherit the family estate. All served with distinction in administration, as merchants or in the military, but none of James's brothers returned to Scotland. The Fraser family papers have survived and are listed by the National Register of Archives. The brothers' correspondence and James's diaries provide detailed information on daily, social, military, commercial and artistic life in India; the survival -- now dispersed -- of the collection of Indian miniatures formed by James and his brother William (1785-1835), and particularly of the "Company-School" drawings commissioned by them from native artists, paints a fascinating picture of their interest in exotic surroundings and their appreciation of the considerable ability of Indian artists, who often worked in family groups. The finest pictures in their archive were portraits, painted with wonderful psychological insight by one or more artists from the Delhi region, of individual types and groups of Gurkhas, Sikhs, Pathans, Mewatis and other tribes, who were recruited by William for his irregular force in the Nepal War (1814-1816) and later transferred to join the celebrated Yellow Boys of Skinner's Horse. Soon after his arrival in India (1802) William had been appointed assistant to the resident at Delhi, Charles Seton, and subsequently served with Sir Charles Metcalfe. An able administrator, a brilliant linguist and proud of his cultural understanding of the country, he was first posted as political agent to General Rollo Gillespie, then to Major-General Martindell's army in 1815, serving most effectively both during and after the Nepal War. He was also a great hunter, shooting numerous tigers, both on horseback and on foot. In addition to his salary from the Company, William earned extra income purchasing and shipping goods, breeding and dealing in horses, and sent money home to his father, thus maintaining the Scottish estate in the possession of the family. Following a complex legal dispute arbitrated by William as commissioner