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The party left Calcutta on 21 October 1837, travelling on a ‘flat’, first heading downstream and then through the Sundarbans, a murky green-brown, semi-aquatic, tiger-infested mangrove forest. Few paintings from this claustrophobic part of the journey have survived; there is one in the Victoria Memorial collection showing a rakish-looking William Osborne on deck, smoking shisha from an enormous hookah, fanned by a bearer and attended by a hookah-burdar. Emily does not mention sketching until she reaches Raj Mahl (Rajmahal), 200 miles from Calcutta as the crow flies but more than twice that by boat, then again at Monghyr (Munger), where she and Fanny sketched ‘objects’ all day, and at Seetakund (Sita Kund), they sketched at the famous hot springs until dusk.

Emily Eden’s ‘Servants with Dogs and Hawks belonging to the King of Oude, Lithograph tinted with opaque watercolour and ink on paper pasted on paper, 1844. Photo: DAG.

Throughout the journey, Emily’s vivid written descriptions matched with their visual counterparts enrich our experience and understanding of the ordinary, as well as the extraordinary nature of Lord Auckland’s progress ‘up country’. Her ability to combine a masterful use of language with attractive sketches made what was unimaginable to many at home much easier to visualise and comprehend. Although opinionated and self-consciously entertaining in writing, she was straightforward in painting, and her desire to make a documentary record for private and, latterly, public audiences succeeds as an authentic account of what she witnessed. However, while her interpretation of events, related through a mixture of pathos and humour, attracted many admirers, it often gave a very partial view in support of her brother’s decisions, even when he was mistaken.

On arrival at Benares on 15 November, the Eden party sailed along the river Ganges and took in the view of the whole city before continuing to the adjacent city of Ramnagar, where the raja had a country house. The sights so impressed Emily that she wrote, ‘We mean to keep our steamer here and to go out sketching in it.’ When writing to her sister describing the wealth of the raja and the opulence witnessed during their encounter with him, Emily included a sketch ‘to illustrate........

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