Indian Life - Calcutta, Park Street Cemetery - Michel Testard
🔹 Technique: Acrylic on canvas 🔹 Dimensions: 50 x 70 cm 🔹 Price: €1,250
The old Victorian cemetery on Park Street in Kolkata, a place frozen in time.
Huge trees, humid air, wild grasses and moss-covered tombs.
The graves are those of former British officers, soldiers, women, children, and settlers from the 18th and 19th centuries. Their names can be read on time-worn tombstones: some died very young, from tropical diseases.
The silence, the warmth, the rays filtering through the foliage create a strange and poetic atmosphere, as if out of this world.
I visited this place in 2018 and immediately knew I would paint it. It's a tribute to the forgotten British presence in India, to impermanence, and to the beauty of places of memory.
