Mrs. and Miss Lyall, Shimla (1887): Art, History and Details

Mrs. and Miss Lyall, 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:

A number of Deen Dayal’s Simla portraits include rickshaws, which were items of great novelty, being found in India only in Simla at the time. The two-wheeled, human-powered passenger cart first appeared in Japan around 1870 and was introduced to Simla around 1880 by a Scottish missionary. The town’s steep hills required four drivers, two to pull and two to push. Horse-drawn buggies were another common means of transport. Miss Lyall and Mrs. Lyall also appear in the photograph, suggesting that they had a significant personal relationship with the purchaser of the album.

Object facts

• Title: Mrs. and Miss Lyall, Shimla
• Date: 1887
• Creator attribution: Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844–1905)
• Culture: India
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print
• Dimensions: Image: 19.9 x 27 cm (7 13/16 x 10 5/8 in.); Paper: 19.9 x 27 cm (7 13/16 x 10 5/8 in.)
• Collection: PH - Misc. 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2016.266.7

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Tannenbaum, Barbara. “The Photos of Raja Deen Dayal: The first great Indian photographer.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 63, no. 2 (2023): 10-11.

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.