Thomas Fraser

Thomas Fraser belonged to the corps of military engineers whose surveying duties in southern India made them, almost incidentally, among the most exact topographical draughtsmen of their day. Son of Hugh Fraser, a portrait painter of Morpeth, Thomas Fraser served with the Madras Engineers from 1796 to 1819, rising from Lieutenant in 1800 to Captain in 1808. He was present at the siege of Seringapatam, surveyed forts in the Ceded Districts, and by 1803 was Superintending Engineer of Public Works for the Madras Presidency. An engineer’s eye for terrain carried into his art.

His surviving drawings bear this out. The British Library holds a group of his watercolours of about 1800 to 1802, among them a view of the great fall of the Cauvery at Sivasamudram, the ruins of the pagoda there, and studies of the fort at Gurramkonda drawn with an explanatory key, each inscribed in his own hand. They are the work of a man trained to record ground exactly, and to make a plan legible to another engineer.

The aquatint shown here, ‘Method of Catching Wild Elephants by the Kraal in the Island of Ceylon’ (1817), records one of the island’s great spectacles: the driving of wild elephants into a timber stockade, printed in colours after his own design. An impression survives in the Royal Collection, which catalogues it as a hand-coloured aquatint, published in London by Robert Cribb and Son, of 288 Holborn, on 28 October 1817, and associates it also with the engraver James Robert Thompson. The scene is a wide tropical landscape in which the herd is hemmed within a ring of men bearing lighted torches, palms and distant hills closing the view, and the plate was issued with a lettered key to the action. In the Royal Collection it is classed among maps and topography, the tradition to which an engineer’s training most naturally lent itself. Fraser died in 1823.

Sources

1. Talwatte, Malaka. ‘19th Century Views of Ceylon by British Artists’.
2. The British Library.
3. The Royal Collection.