Virtual witnessing? Balthazar Solvyns and the navigation of precision, c.1790-1840

This essay considers the weight and bearing of the idea of precision and the notion of the virtual in relation to commercial artists travelling to India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Taking as its focus the work of Balthazar Solvyns, my discussion considers the fictional and the factual as relayed by the aesthetic of precision. The aesthetic of precision is by its very nature precarious: to be precarious was to carry something of the virtual and a kind of fictionality which being so performative in its documentary aspect carried its own risk - especially when confronted with so-called Company School/Mughal artists who were highly critical of such colonial practice.