Royal Commonwealth Society : Mica cutting

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Royal Commonwealth Society

<p style='text-align: justify;'>This album was given to the Royal Colonial Institute by India’s High Commissioner, Atul C. Chatterjee, on behalf of his government. Its dedication reads, 'These photographs, illustrating life and scenes in India, are presented in the hope that they will help to make the land and the people of the Indian Empire better known and understood.’</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>The name for the mineral mica comes from the Latin word meaning ‘crumb’, but is probably also associated with the verb micare ‘to glitter’. This property explains why artists in South Asia painted upon very thin, flexible sheets of mica, and also used it to preserve tracings of family paintings and decorate glass windows or temple lanterns. In British India, mica paintings were produced in standard sets for the colonial tourist market, and imitated paintings on glass which were popular in Europe. The RCS has a fine example of these ‘Company paintings’ produced in in Trichinopoly, southern India, in 1869 (RCMS 352).</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>See Janus record <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0115%2FY3022X'>here</a></p>