Victorian Photos

This, one of the finest private collections of early British Raj photography, will be exhibited in Royal Opera Arcade Gallery during the week commencing May 25th 2015. At that time, a further 55 of the collection's finest pieces will be unveiled on this website to compliment the photographs that are currently available.

This collection of fine Indian photography has been refined over half a century and included are vignettes of the vast panorama of India from the years following the Great Mutiny of 1857 to the pre-independence years of the 1930s and 1940s. The portraits of rulers include the feudal chieftains such as the Maharaja of Rewa, part of a stunning disbound 1880s album featuring the court of the young ruler. Also the Rao of Bundi, preserving in the nineteenth-century their chivalric culture much as it was in the fifteenth-century and earlier, making no concessions to their British overlords. Their Sirdars, Courtiers and retainers are all here, dressed and armed as they were five hundred years earlier. The later rulers are also here, swaddled in Star of India silks and badges, their jewellery reset by Cartier and Boucheron. The images capture the Maharajas as Shikaris, their favourite hunting pastime from earliest times and, later, with Viceroys and British Royalty.