#robert home

This portrait of the celebrated ‘India merchant’ William Fairlie was painted in Calcutta in February 1802 by the British artist Robert Home. It is one of Home’s most ambitious and successful works, and is thus one of the most important paintings made in the Raj in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Home’s sitter books record that Fairlie paid the high sum of 3000 rupees. Fairlie is shown with his wife Margaret and their three eldest children William, John, and Agnes Maria. William Fairlie was one of a succession of Scottish traders who made their fortune in the British Empire. He began his agency in Calcutta (where a ‘Fairlie Place’ was first recorded in 1794), in partnership with John Fergusson, a fellow-Ayrshireman. By the turn of the century his firm was involved in a wide range of businesses extending well beyond India. In 1798 Fairlie married Margaret Ogilvy, daughter of John Ogilvy of Murtle, in Calcutta.

He died in the Farhat Bakhsh palace in Lucknow in 1827. He was succeeded by his son Nasir-ud-Din Haider after his death.

View of the Gate of the Lal Bagh, Dacca, Robert Home

The artist, Robert Home, was a British portrait painter who was allowed to follow the army of Lord Cornwallis as it advanced on Bangalore in 1791 during the Third Anglo-Mysore War (1790-1792).  Many of the images in the book were produced during that trip.  The special emphasis on Mysore most likely had to do with the fascination with the kingdom, which under the reign of Tipu Sultan actively (yet ultimately unsuccessfully) resisted the expansion of the British Empire into its territory.  The images and this book, then, could be considered a form of war-reporting; the painter was moving with the army and documenting an enemy’s country.  Some of the images, including two of the four fold-outs at the back of the book, are battle plans or maps of Cornwallis’ campaign. Home later became the court painter for Ghazi-ud-Din Haidar Shah, the ruler of the North Indian state of Oudh, dying in India in 1834. The choice of Persian, and the bilingual nature of the text, at first is surprising, but Persian had a long history as a court language and lingua franca in South Asia, which Home probably would have known given the time he spent in Indian court settings. 

The Royal College of Surgeons of England Collection

Home traveled to the Indian subcontinent in 1791. The sitter, not identified, was likely the wife or more likely the daughter of a wealthy merchant or colonial administrator.

Both Irwin girls are accomplished- one embroiders while the other reads, seated at a piano forte. The paintings on the walls are unusually detailed- Did they have high-ranking relatives in the Army and the Navy? In any case, seems Robert Home specialized in painting Accomplished Young Ladies of the British contingent in India.

Robert Home was an English painter who spent most of his career in India, painting portraits of the British community there. Read more about his career here.