Henry Salt · Malaka Talwatte

Henry Salt was born at Lichfield on 14 June 1780, the son of Thomas Salt, a physician, and came to art through portraiture, studying in London before he turned to the topographical work that made his early name.

Henry Salt's 1809 aquatint view near Point de Galle, groves of coconut palms about a still stretch of water with small figures. — Henry Salt, Point de Galle, Ceylon, 1809. Aquatint in colours, 75 × 66 cm, private collection. The view in the vicinity of Point de Galle is taken at the spot where ended a canal, which had been constructed by the Dutch for the purpose of bringing down from the forests of the interior these beautiful woods, which form the chief ornament of the cabinet work of Europe. The groves of cocoa-nut trees which invariably in Ceylon are cultivated in the vicinity of towns add greatly to the beauty of the scene and form a roof of foliage impervious to the rays of the sun. Point de Galle itself is inferior only to Trincomalee as a harbour; it might be rendered more safe by removing several rocks which make the entrance dangerous; but the chief trade is removed to Colombo, and all naval supplies are sent to Trincomalee, as a better harbour. The climate of Point de Galle is, in general, good; Ceylon has not the alternate rainy season like the coast of Malabar and Coromandel; but being situated between them is at all times liable to occasional showers, which cool the air. From its situation on a peninsula, Point de Galle has generally a pleasant breeze from the sea. (De Silva, Rajpal Kumar, 1985, Early Prints of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 1800 to 1900.)

Henry Salt (1780–1827) came out in 1802 as secretary and draughtsman to George, Viscount Valentia, upon a grand tour of the East, having studied under Joseph Farington and John Hoppner, both Royal Academicians, before his departure. Of the twenty-four aquatints he published in London in 1809, printed in colours and engraved by D. Havell, J. Hill and J. Bluck, but a single plate represents Ceylon, a view of Point de Galle; it exhibits, nonetheless, an authority to which Cordiner’s drawings do not attain. Salt was afterwards to become one of the foremost Egyptologists in Britain and Consul-General in Egypt, under whose patronage Abu Simbel was first cleared; yet the Ceylon view, made when he was but twenty-two, already displays the precision of eye and the assurance of hand that were to characterise the whole of his subsequent career.

The volume that carried the Ceylon plate, ‘Twenty Four Views taken in St. Helena, the Cape, India, Ceylon, Abyssinia and Egypt’, was issued in London by William Miller and dedicated to the Marquis Wellesley, the Governor-General who had received the Valentia party at Calcutta; its Ceylon sheet is lettered ‘View near the Point de Galle’. Salt returned to Britain in 1806, undertook a government mission to Abyssinia between 1809 and 1811, and in 1816 took up the post of British Consul-General in Egypt, which he held until his death. There he employed Giovanni Belzoni to work at Thebes, Giza and Abu Simbel, and directed the removal of the colossal head of Ramesses II, the ‘Younger Memnon’, to London; the first of his great collections of Egyptian antiquities, purchased in 1823, formed the nucleus of the British Museum’s holdings from ancient Egypt. He died at Desouk, in the Nile delta, on 30 October 1827, in his forty-eighth year.

Sources

Talwatte, Malaka. ‘19th Century Views of Ceylon by British Artists’.
De Silva, Rajpal Kumar. Early Prints of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 1800 to 1900. London: Serendib Publications, 1985.
Twenty Four Views taken in St. Helena, the Cape, India, Ceylon, Abyssinia and Egypt. London: William Miller, 1809.

Sources

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