Man Dyeing Cloth (early 1830s): Art, History and Details

Man Dyeing Cloth (early 1830s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Members of the British East India Company, largely merchants themselves, collected picture books that were compendiums of Indian professions and occupations, made by a new class of commercial Indian artists. They often emphasized the exotic and primitive aspects of life in India, such as the turbaned, pajama-clad man, squatting on the ground with a blank expression, making dye and hand-coloring strips of cloth using simple terracotta vessels.

Object facts

• Title: Man Dyeing Cloth
• Date: early 1830s
• Culture: India, Company School, Lucknow, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera and ink on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 22.2 x 15.9 cm (8 3/4 x 6 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1992.142

Collection credit

Seventy-fifth anniversary gift of William E. Ward in memory of his wife, Evelyn Svec Ward

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1992.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (February 1993): 38–79.

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.