Tree and serpent worship
Tree and Serpent Worship: Illustrations of Mythology and Art in India in the First and Fourth Centuries after Christ: from the sculptures of the Buddhist topes at Sanchi and Amravati, London: India Museum: India Office (W. H. Allen & Co.), 1873 (first published in 1868)
pp.xvi; 274 pages and extra numbered pages 270a-270b. "Postscript' slip tipped in facing p. x., including frontispiece after a drawing of the northern gateway at Sanchi by Lt-Col. Maisey; 1 double-page colour lithograph plan of the Amravati 'stupa'; 1 tinted lithographic map of Amravati. Plus 98 plates on 76 leaves carrying 14 mounted albumen prints by James Waterhouse; 38 albumen prints by W. H. Griggs; 20 tinted lithographic plates and 25 uncoloured lithographic plates. Black and white wood engravings in the text.
Publisher's red half hard-grain morocco on green sand-grained cloth, title gilt to the spine, neatly rebacked with the original spine laid down, large Naga Raja disk gilt to the upper board, top edge gilt, marbled end papers.
13.5 x 11 x 2.75 in (34.4 x 27.9 x 7 cm)
NON-EXPORTABLE
An important early photographically-illustrated work on the mythology and beliefs represented in Indian Buddhist architecture.
James Fergusson (1808-1886), was one of Victorian Britain's most prominent architectural historians, respected by Ruskin, and the dedicatee of Schliemann's great work Tiryns, as "the historian of architecture, eminent alike for his knowledge of art and for the original genius which he has applied to the solution of some of its most difficult problems". However, he had no university education and began his career working for the family firm of Fairlie, Fergusson & Co. in Calcutta, before going into business as an indigo planter, he quickly made his fortune "and was able to retire, and as 'an expert draughtsman with a camera-lucida' he explored India 'chiefly on a camel's back, from end to end and from side to side' exploring the rock-cut temples of Ajanta, Ellora, and elsewhere" (ODNB). In 1866, he was preparing a display on Indian architecture for the 1867 Paris Exhibition and was looking for sculptures, or architectural fragments, to cast "to draw attention...[and] give some character" to his exhibition of photographs. He was "not a little astonished" to discover that " large collection of marbles" from Amravati Tope - a site that he had "thought it well worth [making] a voyage to India especially for the purpose of exploring" - were stored for their preservation in the coach-house of the India Museum at Leadenhall Street (Preface). So he set to work on a monograph describing the site, and to this end, the pieces were photographed by William Griggs, the Museum photographer, and inventor of the photo-lithographic process by which many of the plates in the present work were produced. In the course of his researches on the subject, Fergusson then uncovered "a beautiful series of drawings" of Sanchi Tope in the Indian Office library, at the same time receiving " a set of photographs" of the same monument from Lieut. James Waterhouse, which lead him to reconsider the form of the book, expanding it to combine the accounts of the two monuments. Waterhouse, whose images of Sanchi Tope arrived so serendipitously, went on to become President of the Royal Photographic Society 1905-6, having been awarded the Society's Progress Medal in 1891 for his work on dye sensitising; and Griggs' pioneering work in chromo photolithography, and with the half-tone and collotype processes lead to him being obituarized by the Printer's Register as "that venerable craft father of ours".
According to THE INDIA MUSEUM 1801-1879 by Ray Desmond [1982], p. 115, the 1868 and 1873 editions together totaled only 500 copies.
James Waterhouse [18421922] was a British photographer and Indian Army officer who headed the Photographic Department of the Survey of India. His photographs of the Central Provinces were published by the Alkazi Collection of Photography in a critical monograph titled THE WATERHOUSE ALBUMS in 2009 and included his Sanchi photographs in this book.