Dated June 1808

Inscribed ‘Ambarsumdrum, Tinivally..June 1808’ and initialled

Grey wash and ink on laid paper

37.5 by 60 cm.

Sir James Lillyman Caldwell, General and Colonel Commandant of the Royal (late Madras) Engineers, lived a long life that combined a taste for military adventure and obvious danger with an equal enthusiasm for intellectual ingenuity and artistic expression.

He began his time in India in 1788 as a cadet of the East India Company gaining his first commission with the Madras Engineers in the following year. In 1791, he joined the forces lead by Cornwallis for the campaign against Tipu Sultan. Tipu’s forces were protected by a series of hill top forts across the region which were successively attacked by the British. Caldwell took part in many assaults in this campaign, both engineering the breaching of apparently impregnable defences and as a member of storming parties during which he suffered injury. At the start of the following year he took part in the Cornwallis night time attack on Tipu’s entrenched camp outside Seringapatam. This led to a protracted siege during which Caldwell was again wounded. A peace treaty with Tipu was agreed and Caldwell returned to Madras. For the next few years, his energies were spent on projects to improve public works until, in 1799, General Harris drew his forces together for another and final assault on Tipu Sultan. Caldwell led the ladder party in the successful assault in the second siege of Seringapatam, suffering injury twice including being shot at the top of the breach before falling into the ditch.

Upon recovery, he resumed his civil duties for a number of years but in 1810 adventure beckoned and he joined the British forces sailing to Mauritius to take on the French. Six months later he returned to his duties as a Chief Engineer in the Madras army and was charged with the duties of restoring the fortress at Seringapatam and subsequently the French settlements on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts. It was during this period that, with Major Thomas Fiott de Havilland, Caldwell designed the Cathedral Church of St. George in southern Chennai whose baroque design was inspired James Gibbs’ St. Martins-in-the-Field in London.

In 1837, he retired from the active list, receiving the K.C.B., and returned home to live at first in Paris and then, upon the death of his French wife, between London and the Isle of Wight, where he died in 1863.

He was noted for his skill as a watercolourist and his work as a surveyor of monuments afforded him both the time and opportunity to record the forts, palaces and temples of South India. A small number of his works are held in the collection of the British Library.