Imagery of “Indian” Architecture, Exoticism, and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century France

When Walter Benjamin noted that early nineteenth-century French bourgeois domestic interiors were turned into theaters, he had in mind hand-printed wallpapers with panoramic scenes, the popularity for which peaked in France from the late eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century. These French wallpapers were exported not only to other European countries but also to North America. The imagery of one such wallpaper, “L’Hindoustan,” was taken from a series of aquatints produced by the architectural painters Thomas Daniell and William Daniell that highlighted monumental Mughal architecture. 

This paper traces the origins and circulation of imagery representing what would be considered as typically “Indian” architecture in France and beyond during the nineteenth century through wallpapers and other material culture, prints, magazines, travelogues, faux-travelogues, popular illustrated literature, posters, and other media. I seek to draw a new framework for understanding the circulation of knowledge and imagery about “India” by engaging with the broader visual culture of the period beyond works of fine art. This paper examines the ways in which the imagery evolved through the expansion of visual culture, consumer culture, new circuits of knowledge and cultural exchange, and the transformation of publishing from the mid nineteenth-century onwards. French fascination with the culture of the Indian subcontinent was increasingly influenced by imperial rivalry against Britain. As an imperial power with minor holdings in India compared to Britain, France’s view of India remained particularly exoticist, encouraging the production of fantasy not only around “Oriental” architecture but also a self-perception vis-à-vis India that evolved from mutual respect and admiration towards benign sovereignty. The very vagueness of the imagery had a simultaneously re-affirming and destabilizing effect of “Oriental” imagery and its relationship to the notions of continental boundaries.