Cleveland Museum of Art

Great Pagoda, Great Bull, Front View, Tanjore, India (Rajarajeshvara Temple), plate 12 from Photographic Views of Tanjore and Trivady (Madras: Madras Presidency)

Date

1857

Medium

salted paper print from calotype negative

Culture

England

Department

Photography

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

In a pillared pavilion called a mandapa, a colossal stone sculpture of Nandi, the mount of the Hindu god Shiva, faces the doorway to the main temple sanctum. The inner wall and section of the great gateway leading into the sacred site can be seen in the background of Tripe’s photograph. As an active Indian temple, the plinth, or base, of the pavilion is painted with alternating red and white stripes. Tripe, however, opted not to include any living presence in the image, since humans and animals might move and create a blur, spoiling his clear photographic record of the monument. Active in Burma and India during the late 1850s, Linneaus Tripe was a professional soldier and official photographer for the Madras Presidency in India from 1856 to 1860.

The authoritative record is held by Cleveland Museum of Art. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.