A Portrait of the Hindus

Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr.

Errata, Updates, and Discussion

P. 7.  Acknowledgments. 

In the United Kingdom.  I am deeply embarrassed by the discovery that I omitted the name of Partha Mitter, who had from the beginning of the Solvyns project assisted me in a variety of ways.  He is acknowledged later, p. 57, for providing the illustration (Pl. I.22) of the title page for Livraison 28 of Les Hindoûs.

Corrected spellings for the following names are: In the United Kingdom, Robert Blythe; in the Netherlands, L. B. Holthuis; and in the United States, Stewart Gordon.

P. 16. Re William Hodges.  See Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill, eds, William Hodges, 1774-1797:  The Art of Exploration.  New Haven/London: Yale University Press for the National Maritime Museum, Greenwick, 2004. 

Pp. 21, 25.  Michael Nash discusses ship building in late eighteenth century Calcutta and the connection between India and New South Wales, with plates of Solvyns’s paintings of “The Charlotte of Chittagong” (p. 17) and “The Launching of Gabriel Gillet’s Armed Merchantman in Calcutta Harbor” (p. 63). Cargo for the Colony:  The Wreck of the Merchant Ship Sydney Cove, Sydney: Braxus Press, 1996.

Pp. 82, 266.  “Colonel Green” is identified as Charles Green (1735-1771) in Christie’s Arts of India sales catalog, 24 September 2003, Lot 37 (p. 49), Watercolor, “Dancing Girls and Musicians, Coromandel, Madras.”  The description notes that ten drawings by Green of sepoys are in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen. 

P. 84.  Solvyns’s drawing of the spinning of cotton and weaving (Pl. I.37) was used in his Paris edition etching “Cotton” (Pl. II.274) illustrated on p. 515.  

Pp. 167-68.  Solvyns titles his portrait of the Kshatriya (Pl. II. 20) in the Calcutta edition with the name “K’huttry,” and in the Paris edition with “K’huttery.”  In his discussion, it is clear that Solvyns intends to depict the second of the four varna, but Joanna Kirkpatrick, in a personal communication, suggests that his transliteration may not be of Kshatriya, but of Khatri.  Risley, in The Castes and Tribes of Bengal, 1:478-84, describes the Khatri as a Punjabi mercantile caste, fairly numerous in Bengal and regarded as “superior in physique” (1:478).  That they are traders might seem to make it unlikely that Solvyns would take them as the model for the Kshatriya, but they were also landowners, and Risley writes that “Khatris allege themselves to be the direct descendants of the Kshatriyas of early Indian tradition . . . “ (1:481).

P. 172.  Fn. 4. Craufurd (not Crawford).

P. 266.  The painting by Hodges of five native officers is reproduced in Quilley and Bonehill, William Hodges, 1744-1797:  The Art of Exploration, p. 171. 

The Solvyns Project

Solvyns: A Portrait of the Hindus