Great Pagoda, Great Bull, Front View, Tanjore, India (Rajarajeshvara Temple), plate 12 from Photographic Views of Tanjore and Trivady (Madras: Madras Presidency) (1857): Art, History and Details

Great Pagoda, Great Bull, Front View, Tanjore, India (Rajarajeshvara Temple), plate 12 from Photographic Views of Tanjore and Trivady (Madras: Madras Presidency) (1857) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Captain Linnaeus Tripe (British, 1822–1902).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

In a pillared pavilion called a mandapa, a colossal stone sculpture of Nandi, the mount of the Hindu god Shiva, faces the doorway to the main temple sanctum. The inner wall and section of the great gateway leading into the sacred site can be seen in the background of Tripe’s photograph. As an active Indian temple, the plinth, or base, of the pavilion is painted with alternating red and white stripes. Tripe, however, opted not to include any living presence in the image, since humans and animals might move and create a blur, spoiling his clear photographic record of the monument.

Object facts

• Title: Great Pagoda, Great Bull, Front View, Tanjore, India (Rajarajeshvara Temple), plate 12 from Photographic Views of Tanjore and Trivady (Madras: Madras Presidency)
• Date: 1857
• Creator attribution: Captain Linnaeus Tripe (British, 1822–1902)
• Culture: England
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: salted paper print from calotype negative
• Dimensions: Image: 27.2 x 38 cm (10 11/16 x 14 15/16 in.); Paper: 28 x 39.1 cm (11 x 15 3/8 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 61 cm (20 x 24 in.)
• Collection: PH - British 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1987.218

A detail from the museum

Active in Burma and India during the late 1850s, Linneaus Tripe was a professional soldier and official photographer for the Madras Presidency in India from 1856 to 1860.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1986.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 74, no. 2 (February 1987): 38–79.
• Hinson, Tom E. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.