Encounters at the Crossroads of Cultures and Disciplines: A Multidisciplinary Project to Analyse Indian Paintings at National Museums Scotland
Resource type
Conference paper (unpublished)
Creator (person)
Rodriguez Jimenez, Juan Pablo
Voigt, Friederike
Abstract
How can art historians better incorporate the implications of everyday life into their understanding and interpretation of artworks? This paper presents a case study to demonstrate that collaborative research can be crucial to efforts to change the interpretative narrative of artworks. In an ongoing pilot study, a multidisciplinary team at NMS is re-evaluating a rare group of mid-eighteenth-century Indian paintings. Formerly interpreted as physically coherent works, our study has found evidence that they are, in fact, composites, likely shaped during cultural exchange between European customers and Indian artisans.
The paintings were brought to Scotland in 1766 by Archibald Swinton (1731–1804), a captain in the East India Company’s army in Bengal. For several decades, Swinton had them displayed on the walls of his stately dining room at Kimmerghame (Duns) as a memory of his time in India. Visual observation shows a similar pattern of physical and pictorial alterations across several of these paintings. If it were possible to demonstrate, for example, that they date to the time of creation of the paintings, they would suggest that local Indian artisans worked to Swinton’s brief.
To test hypotheses such as this, we established a multidisciplinary team drawing on expertise in paper and artefact conservation, photography, analytical and heritage science and art history. The team uses primary source analysis, visual analytical techniques, and scientific analytical methods, such as x-ray fluorescence, radiography, and hyperspectral imaging, to reconstruct, in an iterative process, the trajectory of these paintings.
Event title
Association for Art History Annual Conference 2026
Publisher
Association for Art History Annual
Rights statement
In Copyright