Around the same time that George Washington was walking along the Potomac looking for a good place to build the capital of a new nation,

…over here in Delhi, a group of English gentlemen - who called themselves the Romantics - were arriving with pencils and sketchbooks.

They came to draw the landscape and publish these miniatures back home in fashionable multi-volume collections with names like ‘Oriental Scenery.’

The west fixed its gaze on an exotic version of India in the late 1700s and, judging by the fact that a single volume of ‘Oriental Scenery’ recently sold at Christies for over $400,000, this fascination continues.

In as much as colonialism was a project of the imagination, it required romantic drawings like these to first seduce thousands of English hearts with the desire of not just visiting India, but of owning her.

These drawings blended fact with fancy to become what Hermione de Almeida calls ‘official fiction’

At the beginning of British India, the permission for empire followed tiny intricate drawings like these -

-the kind experienced through a magnifier -

-a device that only works if you lean in closely.

You would open the book with this hand, hold your magnifier with the other hand…and then it would happen:

You’d fall in love with India for the first time.