Strange and Wondrous: Prints of India from the Robert J. Del Bontà Collection

As global travel boomed from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, Europeans and Americans became increasingly fascinated with Indian culture. Merchants, soldiers, and missionaries documented their visits to India and other foreign lands in illustrated accounts. Created using such techniques as engraving, aquatint, lithography, and photogravure, these subjects and designs were easily duplicated, and copies circulated widely. Publishers regularly edited, amended, or simply reprinted them in publications as varied as atlases, memoirs, and history books.

The spread of these images led to broader knowledge and interest in Indian culture—but also to the creation and proliferation of negative stereotypes. Ascetics, or religious figures who renounce material comforts, were depicted over the years as supernatural beings, devout penitents, militants, tricksters, and beggars. Religious ceremonies were interpreted within a Christian framework instead of a Hindu one, leading to misconceptions of devotees as sinners or fanatics. With the aid of Indian art, deities were catalogued as lovers, drug users, and creators of the cosmos, which fed generalizations of India as a sensual, spiritual land.

The fifty artworks in Strange and Wondrous, from the encyclopedic Robert J. Del Bontà collection, show how certain ascetics and Hindu practices became emblems for all that Europeans and Americans found exotic, repulsive, or remarkable in India. By tracing how these images were interpreted and reproduced over time, the exhibition also demonstrates how perceptions of Indian culture shifted through the centuries, from the Enlightenment to the colonial period and Christian missionary movement, and into modernity. Together these prints reveal structures of the European and American imagination as much as they encapsulate conceptions of India.

History of a Print

The location of publication

The fifty prints in Strange and Wondrous can be mapped by space, language, and time. Images and texts were copied primarily in Europe but also in India and North America. They were translated between Latin, Dutch, English, French, German, and Italian, and consistently printed and reprinted from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

Zoom into the map and click the pinpoints to compare when, where, and in what language the prints were published, and to see how subjects and designs moved between cities.

Dr. Robert J. Del Bontà

A polymath scholar, curator, collector, and jeweler, Dr. Robert J. Del Bontà began to collect prints related to India while completing his doctorate in South Asian art history at the University of Michigan in the 1970s. His wide-ranging collection contains more than two thousand loose prints and thousands more within books. It also spans genres such as Indian calendar prints, ephemera, painting, and sculpture, and British Raj-era publications; and subjects such as ornament, flora and fauna, and the emphasis of this exhibition, Indian ascetics, deities, and religious ceremony.

In his collecting practices, Del Bontà traces how Europeans and Americans constructed knowledge about India through prints. He focuses on the curious mixture that resulted when events witnessed “up close” in India were published “from afar,” in Europe or America. A careful attention to prints made “up close” allows Del Bontà to see how Indian and European texts and visual resources influenced travelers’ on-the-spot observations in India. By viewing prints created “from afar,” he examines how printmakers and publishers fluent in European artistic conventions adapted travelers’ in-person observations, always adding a dash of fantasy. He further tracks how compositions were copied and altered over long stretches of time, inspiring questions about publication practices as well as the accuracy of these images.

Above all, he considers these prints a rich resource for education. A promised gift, the objects in this exhibition will be available in the National Museum of Asian Art Archives for use in studying and interpreting the long history of Europeans and Americans attempting to document, understand, and evaluate Indian culture through print.

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