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Foreign artists painted Benares—now generally called Varanasi—as a city shaped by the Ganges and its ghats, but they did not see it in one way. George Landseer made a cremation ghat the subject of a solemn riverfront scene; Edwin Lord Weeks focused on temples and bathing; Marius Bauer idealised the sunlit city; and Maurice Sterne used vivid color and flattened perspective to convey both daily life and a personal spiritual response. Their paintings are revealing not as a single portrait of the city, but as distinct artistic choices.
Four paintings, four ways of seeing Benares
The works below, held by museums and dated from 1861 to 1913, show how the riverfront could be framed through different subjects, moods, and pictorial approaches. The dates and descriptions follow the institutions’ collection records.
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| Artist and painting | Date and medium | What the image emphasizes |
|---|---|---|
| George Landseer, Cremation ghat at Benares (Varanasi) | 1861; oil on canvas | Manikarnika Ghat and the smoke of funeral pyres. |
| Edwin Lord Weeks, Temples and Bathing Ghat at Benares | Circa 1883–1885; oil on canvas | Temples and a bathing ghat, in a study associated with his India travels. |
| Maurice Sterne, Benares | 1912; oil on canvas | Figures and daily life arranged across a flattened picture plane, with bright reds and yellows. |
| Marius Bauer, Benares | 1913; oil on canvas | A sunlit, idealised riverfront with bathing figures and rowers. |
Landseer: the cremation ghat as subject
George Landseer’s 1861 painting identifies its setting as Manikarnika Ghat, one of Benares’s cremation sites. The Asian Art Museum points to two plumes of smoke as signs of funeral pyres. Landseer had travelled to India in 1859. By making cremation visible, the painting gives the riverfront a gravity quite different from images centered on bathing or picturesque architecture. Asian Art Museum: Cremation ghat at Benares (Varanasi).
Weeks: temples, bathing, and the question of observation
Edwin Lord Weeks’s Temples and Bathing Ghat at Benares brings architecture and bathing to the foreground. The Brooklyn Museum says the oil study was probably made during or around Weeks’s first extended visit to India in 1882–83. It may have been painted in a temporary studio in Benares, perhaps with the help of photographs; the museum describes its broad brushwork as having an on-the-spot quality, while leaving the precise working process uncertain.
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The museum connects the study with Weeks’s later painting The Last Journey, Souvenir of the Ganges, Benares, exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1885. That relationship makes it useful to distinguish a study from a finished exhibition work: the former documents an exploratory stage, not necessarily a complete or unmediated record of what the artist saw. Brooklyn Museum: Temples and Bathing Ghat at Benares.
Sterne: color, daily life, and a spiritual response
Maurice Sterne travelled to India in 1911, spent time in Benares, and painted Benares in 1912, according to the Phillips Collection. Its description highlights flattened perspective, saturated reds and yellows, and figures spread across a single picture plane. Rather than relying on a conventional illusion of deep space, the composition makes the people and color assert themselves across the surface.
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Sterne also described the city as changing his inner life. The Phillips Collection quotes him: “It was not until I got to Benares that I became aware that something new had entered my own spirit, that India was more to me that a mere exotic stimulation of my senses, more that another experience to remember. It had entered into my own spirit and altered, by some mysterious process, my inner life and reactions.” The repeated “more that” is the wording reproduced by the collection. This is Sterne’s account of his own response, not a neutral explanation of Benares or of Indian religious life.
The collection also quotes Sterne describing “noise, raucous color and poverty on one hand; deep spiritual peace on the other.” That contrast tells us how he framed his experience; it should not be mistaken for an objective summary of the city or its people. The Phillips Collection: Benares.
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Bauer: a sunlit and idealised riverfront
Marius Bauer’s 1913 Benares presents a bright riverfront: the Rijksmuseum describes steps by the river, a bathing woman and child, and rowers. Bauer’s six-month trip to India in 1897 inspired later work, so this painting followed the journey rather than being made during it. The museum characterizes the scene as idealised, noting that it leaves no room for suffering and poverty and instead concentrates on the sunlit city.
That omission matters when comparing the paintings. Bauer’s calm, luminous setting is not simply another neutral view of the same place; it is a selection of what to include and what to leave outside the frame. Rijksmuseum: Benares.
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What these paintings include—and what they leave out
The Ganges and its ghats anchor these images, but the artists’ subjects lead to different versions of the city: Landseer foregrounds death and smoke; Weeks links bathing with temple architecture; Sterne combines figures, vivid color, and an account of spiritual transformation; Bauer constructs an idyllic, sunlit scene. The contrast is not just between styles. It is also between chosen experiences and viewpoints.
Historical testimony likewise needs attribution. A catalogue records Lady Charlotte Canning, Vicereine of India and an amateur watercolourist, describing Benares as “for not a trace or touch of anything European exists there”. That is Canning’s period opinion, not a factual guarantee that the city was untouched by Europe. The catalogue cites John McAleer’s Picturing India: People, Places, and the World of the East India Company (2017, p. 122) for the remark. Mohtashemi Art catalogue: “View of Benares”.
Foreign visitors and Company School paintings are not the same category
Not every Benares image associated with Western influence was painted by a foreign visitor. The British Museum catalogues a nineteenth-century gouache on mica as a Company School work, with its production place cautiously given as Varanasi “(?)”. The V&A explains that Company paintings can combine local traditions with Western-influenced styles. These records provide context for artistic exchange, but they do not make Company School works foreign-authored by default.
A catalogue of artists who spent time in Benares names English artists James Prinsep, William Hodges, Edwin Lord Weeks, William Carpenter, Edward Lear, William Simpson, and the Daniells, along with German-speaking artists Eduard Hildebrand, Erich Kips, and Ludwig Hans Fischer. That list identifies a wider field for study; it does not by itself establish that each artist made a surviving painting of the city. British Museum: “Painting on mica, possibly painted in Varanasi”; Victoria and Albert Museum: “Changing Displays at the Nehru Gallery: Conservation of Company Paintings at the V&A”.
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