François Balthazar Solvyns (1760-1824) was a Flemish marine painter and printmaker. He lived in Kolkata (Calcutta) in 1791-1803, where he made ethnographic drawings and etchings of the occupations, modes of transportation, festivals, and customs of Bengali life and society. He published some 250 etchings in A Collection of Two Hundred and Fifty Coloured Etchings: Descriptive of the Manners, Customs and Dresses of the Hindoos, printed in Calcutta in 1796. After returning to Europe in 1803, he reworked 288 of his etchings for a bilingual French/English edition, Les Hindoûs, 4 vols., which was published in Paris in 1808-1812.
In this colored etching from Les Hindoûs (Vol 2, Pl. 11), a wealthy Hindu woman dressed in her full finery with copious jewelry sits against an embroidered silk bolster in a room or verandah looking out into the garden. Her attendants fan her, offer her pan (betel-leaf quids), and tend her hookah. In the illustration’s accompanying text, Solvyns describes the woman’s seclusion and life of leisure while living in purdah (social isolation).
