Painting history: The legacy of Robert Home

It's December, and Bengaluru is buzzing with cultural events. One of the quieter ones, 'From Bangalore, with Love,' is an exhibition at the NGMA of photographic postcards depicting Bangalore-Bengaluru scenes between 1890 and 1910.

- Roopa Pai

Winging their way to England, postcards like these served equally to ignite imaginations and allay concerns about the faraway places the British were serving at.

The first publicly available photographic process, daguerreotype, was invented by the 19th-century French scientist, painter and photographer, Louis Daguerre, in 1839. British India was the first country outside Europe to have professional photographic studios, with the first known photograph of Calcutta's Sans Souci theatre, dating as far back as 1840! Decades before photos of India began making the rounds, however, the British public's consuming curiosity about this faraway, exotic land was fed by the work of British 'Orientalist' artists, who travelled through the country, producing images of landscapes, buildings, and people.