No.18 - From Oxford to Madras - Robert Monk

It's taken almost an age but after months of umming and ahhing over painstaking research about what to draw and what not to, a flurry of activity struck me about three weeks ago which propelled this picture from the rough drawing stage to completion! And i have to say, i'm quite pleased with how it turned out :)

Photos 1 + 2 - I decided to go back to the central architectural layout that i've used a few times because i think it gives a nice structure to the whole picture. This time, i chose the Chennai Art Gallery for the main building which i chose for it's shape more than anything else. I wanted the main building to be Indo Saracenic, a style which was an Indian Muslim style of architecture developed by the British. In the second picture, you can see a row of buildings which are clearly not from Madras - these are buildings from the village of St Giles, Oxford, England where Rob Monk was born in 1780 and i chose these 3 buildings because they were standing at the time he lived there.

Photo 3 - The sailing ship is based on the type of ship that Robert would have sailed to India on in 1806. I wasn't able to find out the exact ship but I think that it's pretty close. And there's the little white car again! This time, i'm driving! it's my journey :) The yellow flowers are taken from a design from a early 1800s gold necklace from Madras. The blue and white tiles are a reference to Dutch settlement in the area where they lived.

Photo 4 - Robert and Mary's nine children on the wall presented a problem because they were born over a period of about 26 years and many of them had died before others were born, so i was not able to portray them in any particular year. I thought about depicting a cemetery to show that Robert and Mary had suffered the loss of 5 children, in fact, i thought about it for a long long time - months but decided to show them all alive simply because family history is about learning of people's lives, even if that life was brief. The story that I have depicted is about my search to learn about their lives. One of the children has the letter J on his shoulder - that's Joseph Monk, he was my ancestor.

Photo 5 - The two portraits on the upper left and also at the front of the building are Robert Monk b.1780 and his wife Mary b.1801. We don't know what Rob looked liked, so i've based my Rob on a photograph of his greatgrandson Patrick, who is my grandfather. Rob's portrait also looks a bit like my Uncle Larry :) I'm quite happy with the way Rob's portrait turned out, he looks like a nice chap - i suppose that we all like think that our ancestors were nice people, don't we. I've dressed Rob in clothing he would have worn in England - whilst a poor tradesman breeches maker, as a tailor he would have dressed well. I've done his portrait in a fairly traditional English way, whilst Mary's is more designerly, in the Indian style with silver mirror pieces around the border. As for Mary's appearance, that is entirely unknown - though we can assume from the general way things were at that time that she was probably an Anglo Indian with Portuguese leanings or else Hindu, so i have painted her as a Hindu and also an an Anglo Indian to express my imaginings about this mystery. The tree around the portraits with the Forget Me Not flowers represent the Family Tree. The footprints represent the 1000s of kilometres that Rob would have marched around India in the Army.

There are also loads of other details which i haven't discussed - tiles, embroideries, the elephant, the Maharajah of Tanjore, my cats Horatio and Daisy, south Indian jewellery, Idlies, Forget Me Not flowers, trees ... lots of things!

Hope you like my painting, thank you for viewing :)