Delhi Art Gallery show
The Delhi Art Gallery opened an exhibition interrogating why ‘picturesque’ landscape paintings of British India still resonate — the show stitches together British and Indian works to probe nostalgia, empire and visual language. (theweek.in) It positions heritage as a live conversation, not a relic, and is timed with a growing public debate over how Delhi remembers its layered past. (theweek.in)
The show, titled The Indian Picturesque: Landscape Painting 1800–1850, runs at DAG’s Windsor Place space in Janpath, New Delhi from 28 March to 2 May 2026, with an opening preview on 27 March 2026. (dagworld.com) Giles Tillotson, senior vice‑president (Museum Exhibitions) at DAG, is the exhibition’s curator and will lead a public guided tour on 4 April 2026 that focusses on large aquatints and illustrated travelogues in the galleries. (theweek.in) The installation deliberately places British prints and Indian paintings from c.1800–1850 side‑by‑side and highlights named makers such as Henry Salt, James Baillie Fraser, George Chinnery and earlier travelers like William Hodges and the Daniells. (dagworld.com) The Week singled out a specific work, Claudius Harris’s Ruined Mosque, the Juma Musjid, Mandu (1852), as an example of the exhibition’s focus on ruined or ‘irregular’ architecture within scenic compositions. (theweek.in) DAG’s curatorial text notes the presence of Company‑style works from Murshidabad and Thanjavur schools in the show and frames that inclusion as evidence that Indian artists assimilated picturesque conventions rather than being only passive subjects of colonial imagery. (dagworld.com) A printed volume accompanying the exhibition, The Indian Picturesque, 1800–1850, is listed as forthcoming from DAG Publications and includes scholarly contributions such as Tom Young’s chapter “The Picturesque in Practice,” edited by Giles Tillotson. (dagworld.com) The timing of the exhibition was noted by coverage as aligning with intensified public debate in Delhi over how the city’s layered past and built heritage should be remembered and presented. (theweek.in)
