Jodhpur

A longtime president of the Society of Artist-Printers, E. S. Lumsden wrote a treatise The Art of Etching (1925) that served as both a technical handbook and a history of the art from Rembrandt through the English etching revival. Jodhpur is one of Lumsden’s many scenes of India, to which he traveled several times. At the top of a mountainous mass is steep-walled Mehrangarh Fort, citadel of power under successive Rajput, Mughal, and British rule, rising directly from its rock and depicted from a low perspective that increases its intimidating scale. The shadowed rocky cliffs near the bottom of the vast hill drop unendingly off the edge of the picture space, only briefly broken by a ledge of reflecting water before resuming their fall. This scene is empty of any human figures, its vast whites suggesting the blinding light of arid rock, the hill itself nearly bare of human habitation—an apparently forbidding country.