His Honor The Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab and Party, Shimla (1887): Art, History and Details

His Honor The Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab and Party, Shimla (1887) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844–1905).

The work and its context

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

This photograph may commemorate a family reunion of the Lyalls. In 1887 James Lyall (1838–1916) (possibly on the left) was appointed lieutenant governor of the Punjab region, the same year that his elder brother Alfred Lyall (1835–1911) (second from left) retired as lieutenant governor of North-Western Provinces. After recovering from a serious illness, Alfred visited James in Simla. The women are likely Alfred’s daughter Mary Evelina Lyall (1868–1948) (left) and “Mrs. Lyall,” possibly Mary’s aunt, James Lyall’s wife. A master at staging group portraits, Deen Dayal used symmetry, proximity, height, and other formal devices to indicate the sitters’ interrelationships and relative ranks.

Object facts

• Title: His Honor The Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab and Party, Shimla
• Date: 1887
• Creator attribution: Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844–1905)
• Culture: India
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print
• Dimensions: Image: 19.5 x 27.4 cm (7 11/16 x 10 13/16 in.); Paper: 19.5 x 27.4 cm (7 11/16 x 10 13/16 in.)
• Collection: PH - Misc. 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2016.266.6

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

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.