Madras Miscellany : The bird Lady and her irascible Lord

Elizabeth Gwillim’s watercolour of a South Indian bird

A recent article in The Hindu’s BusinessLine that drew attention to a woman painter in early 19th Century India reminded me that her meticulous watercolours of birds of Madras not only pre-dated by twenty years the work of perhaps the most famous bird artist of all time, James Audubon, an American, but were also of a quality that enabled viewers to speak of them in the same breath as Audubon’s creations.

 Sadly, her work vanished from the public eye in 1808 and did not come to light again till 1924, by which time there was no shaking Audubon’s reputation. Today, Lady Elizabeth Gwillim’s 121 bird paintings are in the Blacker-Wood Library of McGill University, Montreal, Canada, but not on display. 

The public, therefore, do not have the chance to see the watercolours that have been described as “the finest ever done of Asian birds”.

Elizabeth Symonds, the daughter of an architect, was not known as an artist when she met and married a barrister, Henry Gwillim, who went on to become the Chief Justice of the Isles of Ely, was knighted and then was appointed one of the three justices of the first Supreme Court of Madras.

 The Gwillims arrived in Madras in 1801, accompanied by her Ladyship’s most eligible sister Mary.

 It was in Madras that Lady Elizabeth began to paint in earnest, her work, according to experts, reflecting enormous patience and considerable powers of observation, besides much talent and a “saucy” sense of humour.

It was after tiring of the social whirl of the Madras of the day that Elizabeth and her sister began to spend time in the countryside around the city painting.

 While Elizabeth painted birds, Mary painted fish and flowers. Meanwhile, in the Madras courts, Sir Henry was proving a most quarrelsome member of the judiciary.

Justice Gwillim not only had “violent” disagreements with Sir Thomas Strange, the Chief Justice, and his fellow Puisne Justice, Benjamin Sullivan, but also with the Governor, Lord William Bentinck. 

After the Vellore Mutiny of 1806, Government created a regular police force. When there was a riot in the grain bazaar in Madras and this force tried to put it down, Gwillim had the policemen arrested! 

He held that the police force had been created without the permission of the Supreme Court. Not long after, when an Indian was arrested on a criminal charge, Gwillim admitted a motion of habeas corpus and turned his ire on the Superintendent of Police and the Advocate General. 

Not content with this, he wrote to the Cabinet in England, saying, among other things, “Can these outrages be sanctioned by a Bentinck, by one of that family so illustrious in the cause of liberty? It is impossible! None of the noble blood of the Cavendishes (the Bentinck family) can flow in the veins of this man. He must be some spurious changeling that has been palmed (off) upon that noble family and contaminated it…. What! put a soldier to act as the head of the Police where he is to deprive men of his liberties?... Not one of us is safe. We are living under a complete military despotism…”

The battle between Gwillim and the Chief Justice as well as with the Governor and Government went on for months before the Lords of the Privy Council ordered that he be removed from the Bench.

The behaviour of her husband must have tested the patience of Lady Elizabeth throughout their years in Madras.

 Maybe that’s why she turned to nature and painting for solace.

 But in the end, perhaps even that was not enough, for she died shortly before her husband’s dismissal and was buried on the Island, in the cemetery of St. Mary’s in the Fort.

 Her death left an unanswered question and, therefore, a mystery: 

She died of “unknown causes”, was what the official record stated.

S Muthiah H 13 Oct 2014