View from the Top of the Rock, looking over the native Town, Trichinopoly, India (1878): Art, History and Details

View from the Top of the Rock, looking over the native Town, Trichinopoly, India (1878) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Nicholas & Co. (British, active India, 1873–1905).

The work and its context

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

The Ranganathaswamy Temple, dedicated to the god Vishnu, originated in the 1st century CE and is still active today. This view sets the gopura (temple entrance towers) in their urban context and juxtaposes the vast scale of the complex against the much humbler buildings where the Indian population lived and worked. To see carvings inside the temple complex, look at 2015.37 in the collection.

Object facts

• Title: View from the Top of the Rock, looking over the native Town, Trichinopoly, India
• Date: 1878
• Creator attribution: Nicholas & Co. (British, active India, 1873–1905)
• Culture: India
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print
• Dimensions: Paper: 22.6 x 28.5 cm (8 7/8 x 11 1/4 in.)
• Collection: PH - British 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2024.78

A detail from the museum

The towers in the background mark the largest temple compound in India, which occupies 156 acres.

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.