An album of 120 paintings - Reminiscences of Imperial Dehlie – is a deeply personal account of the city that Thomas Metcalfe came to love and eventually made his home. Commissioned in the early 1840s, the paintings are watercolours of the existing monuments, buildings, shrines, palaces, and houses of Delhi. The miniature paintings are the work of Mazhar Ali Khan, the leading topographic artist of the period in Delhi, and his studio. Metcalfe had the paintings bound in an album, wrote the accompanying descriptive text, and sent it to his daughter Emily in England. 

L-R: The last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar; a verse written in the Emperor's own hand and presented to Metcalfe 

The album also contains verses penned by the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (1838 – 1858). A well known Persian verse, written in Persian script in the Emperor’s own hand, was presented to Metcalfe by the Emperor on 29^th April 1844. Metcalfe’s translation of the verse reads:

Images of Metcalfe's house

The album is a pictorial, cultural and an architectural record of Delhi in the 1840s. Some of the buildings illustrated in the album are non-existent today.  Metcalfe built a house for himself and his family on the banks of the river Yamuna. The house, which had tehkhanas or underground rooms (one of which was used as a billiard room ) to counter the extreme summer of the plains, held a vast collection of art treasures and books, which was destroyed in 1857.

Buildings and monuments of Delhi in early 1840s

There are also pencil drawings of various local scenes by David Thompson, an Anglo-Indian artist living in Delhi.

The album returned to Delhi with Emily, then aged 17, in 1848, and was given to her on her marriage to Edward Clive Bayley in 1850. It is one of the few items from Metcalfe’s collections to escape the destruction of Metcalfe House in 1857. It remained with the Bayley and Ricketts families until 1985.A family heirloom for over a century, the album was recently bought by the British Library with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Art Collections Fund.

Following conservation work the Metcalfe Album is now on display in the John Ritblat Treasures Gallery at the British Library in London, until 1 October 2003. The album will also be digitised and the images will be freely accessible on the Library’s Collect Britain website at www.bl.uk/collectbritain during 2004.

Thomas Metcalfe (1795-1853) - first arrived in Delhi in 1813 where his brother Charles Metcalfe was Resident to the Emperor’s court. He lived there for the next 40 years of his life. Thomas Metcalfe became the agent at Delhi in 1835 and remained at this post until his death in 1853. Metcalfe came from an Anglo-Indian dynasty which sent many generations to India both before and after him.

In 1830 he began to build Metcalfe House, his personal residence on the river Jumna north of Delhi, above the Red Fort. Here he housed his collections of art treasures and books, as well as a collection of relics of Napoleon. A lover of buildings, Metcalfe also converted a tomb near the Qutb Minar into his country house. The Emperor Bahadur Shah also had a ‘monsoon residence’ nearby.