In 1921, Mumbai’s Prince of Wales Museum, today Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, housed a military hospital and a children’s welfare centre. At one of the charity events that year, a British woman, Winifred Strangman, donated a staggering ₹80,000 to the centre. A part of it came from the sale of roses, which seems surprising today but back then it was not unheard of to sell flowers for charity. These were either grown at the rose stalls that Strangman and other aristocratic Bombay ladies had at the museum or at their residences in Apollo Bunder, infers art curator and museum consultant Ruta Waghmare Baptista from her research on Strangman.
Strangman was not just a prominent philanthropist but also a talented artist whom history seems to have forgotten. A new art show, Bombay Blooms. uncovers her work, showcasing six of her large, window-frame-sized paintings of Bombay’s flora at the sub:continent gallery. The exhibition also presents a timeline of other British women artists who painted India’s flora such as Lady (Charlotte) Canning (1817-61), Marianne North (1830-90) and Lena Lowis (1845-1919). Canning was the wife of the first Viceroy of India, Lord Charles John Canning, and North and Lowis were botanist artists, who often travelled solo around the world painting the natural life.
The six oil paintings by Strangman, featuring gulmohar, hibiscus, yellow alamanda, semal, poinsettia, Bengal clock vine and yellow flowering camellia (are the painting named , make for a delightful viewing experience. These are commonly seen in Mumbai and are at the city’s Veermata Jijabai Bhosale Botanical Udyan and Zoo too. Strangman’s paintings bring the vibrance of these flowers indoors. Though just a few may have survived today, believes Dhwani Gudka, co-founder of sub:continent. “Women artists were relegated to the periphery of art-making then,” says Waghmare Baptista. “They were considered hobbyists and not serious artists even if they had formally studied art.” Hence, there is hardly any study or research on them or projects to preserve their works.
Strangman, born Winifred Warneford in South Africa, studied art at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London in the mid-1890s, on a scholarship. In 1896, she moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) after marrying British barrister Thomas Strangman who served as the advocate-general of Bombay and was the chief prosecutor during Mahatma Gandhi’s 1922 sedition trial. She lived in Bombay until the late 1930s. The discovery of Strangman and her work by Gudka and her husband Keshav Mahendru started two years ago at the Unesco World Heritage site Kew Gardens in London. When they saw smaller paintings of Bombay’s flowers by another British woman artist Marriane North at her eponymous gallery at the gardens, they thought there might have been more such women who painted in Bombay, says Gudka. A search across art markets led them to procuring six paintings by Strangman on Bombay’s flora from an undisclosed collector, on display at the gallery currently.
“One can tell that Strangman was very familiar with her subjects and interested in drawing an accurate picture of the flowers but also lent them an artistic touch,” says Waghmare Baptista. “The paintings are made in trueto-life colours, capturing the textures of the foliage and local butterflies in incredible detail.” she adds. In the gulmohar painting, she also paints its seeds, which may not be the prettiest to look at but they are there. Even the placement of butterflies is different in every painting. On the poinsettia you see a yellow butterfly (Coliasnilagiriensis), on top of the flower unlike the Bengal clock vine where the winged creature (Eurema brigitta) hovers close to the ground. “I assume that these are not done for style or ornamentation. She has placed the insects where she may have seen them while studying these flowers,” says Waghmare Baptista.
Another interesting aspect of these paintings is the portrayal of light. Some depict the soft morning light. Others seem to appear brighter, like in the afternoon. Even the perspective she draws these from are different. Some show the front side of the flowers and others feature what appears from the bottom. In the painting of the seemal, you also see what appears like the sea and the hillocks of Bombay in the background. “This is the only show dedicated to a female British artist based in pre-independent Bombay,” says Waghmare.
The curator thinks that these six paintings were made at the end of her stay in Bombay, as a love letter to the city’s gardens. Most painters usually start their floral study with water colours eventually graduating to oils, Waghmare Baptista explains. So, these might be painted after she had mastered the waters, perhaps after a few years of her artistic practice in the city. “Also, it was an accepted social behaviour for British women to go to the gardens and paint its flora and fauna, which Strangman would have done too and presumably liked doing.” adds Baptista Waghmare.
But it’s unfortunate that her works haven’t gotten their due. Even as a lady of a great standing in society, her name appeared just twice or thrice in all the documents Waghmare Baptista studied during her research for the exhibition. One was in the Prince of Wales Museum records about her donation, which also mentions that she gifted six Himyaritic tablets to the museum in 1924. “She was a woman who came from privilege, yet was forgotten. It makes me think if there were other women artists, even from India, that history would be erased?,” says Baptista-Waghmare.
The exhibition is on till 10 July.
Riddhi Doshi is a Mumbai-based arts, culture, travel and lifestyle writer.