Untitled (Three Views of Bombay: Rajabai Clock Tower, Nepean Sea Road and Queen’s Road)
a) W B Partridge
The Clock Tower from the Bandstand, Bombay (Mumbai)
June 22nd, 1881
Watercolour on paper
Signed and dated W. B. Partridge, June 22nd, 1881 (lower left)
7.87 x 9.84 in (20 x 25 cm)
Painted in June 1881, this delicate watercolour by W. B. Partridge records a view of Bombay’s Esplanade, taken from the Cooperage Bandstand Garden and looking northwards. In the foreground, promenading figures in saris and turbans, some shaded by parasols, mingle with passers-by and a horse-drawn gharry. The pathway divides the greenery of what is now the Oval Maidan (to the right) and the Esplanade grounds (to the left), which at the time extended unbroken to the shoreline. The Arabian Sea, just visible on the far left, reminds us that this is a pre-reclamation Bombay, when the foreshore was still open to view.
Dominating the skyline is the Rajabai Clock Tower, completed in 1878 to the designs of Sir George Gilbert Scott in Venetian Gothic style. Commissioned with funding from the prominent broker Premchand Roychand, the 85-metre tower was at once an emblem of Bombay’s financial success and its civic ambition, anchoring the newly emerging University of Bombay precinct, including the Convocation Hall glimpsed adjacent. Today, this ensemble forms part of Mumbai’s UNESCO-designated Victorian Gothic and Art Deco Ensembles.
Partridge’s work stands as both a topographical record and a social document. The careful delineation of strolling figures underlines the Esplanade’s function as a recreational commons—where evening constitutionals, band performances, and social interaction animated colonial Bombay life. At the same time, the formal perspective and the alignment of trees along the path direct the viewer’s gaze to the clock tower, a symbol of regulated time and urban modernity.
The watercolour belongs to the corpus of late 19th-century Bombay city views, complementing works by contemporaries such as Herbert Olivier and John Griffiths but distinguished by its documentary immediacy: a precise date and vantage point, capturing a city in transition between open foreshore and the reclamation-driven metropolis it would soon become.
b) W B Partridge
Nepean Sea Road, Bombay (Mumbai): Figures on the Seafront
June 29th, 1881
Watercolour on paper
Signed and dated W. B. Partridge, June 29th, 1881 (lower left)
7.87 x 9.84 in (20 x 25 cm)
Painted in June 1881, this intimate watercolour records the coastal sweep of Nepean Sea Road as it skirts the western flank of Cumballa Hill—a carriage promenade where the basalt foreshore meets gardened villas and roadside trees. The foreground vignettes—ladies in saris conversing, a seated family group, pedestrians, and a horse-drawn carriage—stage the everyday sociability of Bombay’s western seaboard at the height of the late-Victorian city. The curving parapet wall and black rock shelves lead the eye to low bungalows on the point, with monsoon clouds rising beyond the Arabian Sea.
Named for Sir Evan Nepean, Governor of Bombay 1812–19, Nepean Sea Road (officially renamed Lady Laxmibai Jagmohandas Marg in the 1960s, though the historic name endures) formed part of an elite residential corridor running from Malabar Hill towards Breach Candy. The broad open water to the left evokes pre-reclamation Bombay; along this very shoreline, land would later be reclaimed for Priyadarshini Park, today the principal green space on the road.
Just inland and out of frame to the right stood princely and mercantile residences—among them the Gaekwad family’s Jaya (Jayamahal) Palace on Nepean Sea Road, a landmark subsequently lost to mid-20th-century redevelopment (the palace site giving way to later residential blocks). Partridge’s sheet thus registers the neighbourhood at a hinge moment: the gracious seafront boulevard still bordered by villas and groves, yet on the cusp of intensifying urban change.
Formally, the composition belongs to the period’s picturesque topography: a measured recession along the roadway, flanked by palms and casuarina, with deft touches—parasol reds, sari borders, carriage wheels—picked out over transparent washes. As with Partridge’s dated Bombay views of the same week, the work is both social document and topographical record, fixing a precise day and place on the city’s littoral before large-scale reclamation and redevelopment altered the shoreline and skyline.
c) W B Partridge
Queen’s Road, near the Level Crossing, Churchgate, Bombay (Mumbai)
6 August 1883
Watercolour on paper
Signed and dated W. B. Partridge, 6 August 1883
9.84 x 5.51 in (25 × 14 cm)
Queen’s Road (now Maharshi Karve Road), the north–south artery passing Churchgate and Marine Lines; the Churchgate suburban terminus of the BB&CI Railway opened 10 January 1870, with a level crossing at the station in the late 19th/early 20th century (removed in 1930).
Painted in 1883, Partridge’s vertical composition looks along Queen’s Road near the Churchgate level crossing, a hinge where the city’s carriage traffic, pedestrians and railway life intersected. In the immediate foreground a well-dressed family—likely Parsi—pauses under a green parasol, while a turbaned porter strides past with a crate balanced on his head; a seated figure rests on the left verge, and a lone blue-clad pedestrian recedes toward a picket-fenced gateway. Coconut palms, bungalows and kitchen gardens frame the metalled road, while a skein of birds animates the monsoon sky.
At the time of this view, Queen’s Road (today Maharshi Karve Road) was the principal spine of the western Fort precinct; the BB&CI (Bombay, Baroda & Central India) Railway had pushed its suburban line south to Churchgate in 1870 and onwards to Colaba in 1873, turning this corridor into a daily theatre of arrivals and departures. Contemporary records note the level crossing at Churchgate, a striking reminder of an urban node still retaining rural technologies of movement; it was finally eliminated in 1930 as part of major remodelling works.
Partridge’s handling is brisk and observational—transparent washes for the humid sky and roadside greenery, tighter touches in jewellery, sari borders and footwear—belonging to the late-Victorian taste for picturesque topography that served both residents and travellers. As a document it is unusually precise: date, locale and social milieu cohere in a single sheet, fixing Queen’s Road at the cusp of intensifying suburban rail use and urban densification, decades before Marine Drive and later reclamations re-drew the shoreline. The work complements period photographs and later watercolours of Churchgate/Marine Lines, yet stands apart for its intimate register of dress, class and circulation along Bombay’s emerging civic axis.
Queen’s Road’s later name (Maharshi Karve Road) today spans Churchgate–Marine Lines–Charni Road; the Churchgate level crossing and early station phases are well documented in Western Railway/IRFCA historical materials and contemporary accounts.
CITY, SHORE AND STREET: THREE VIEWS OF COLONIAL BOMBAY BY W B PARTRIDGE
Executed between 1881 and 1883, these three finely observed watercolours by W. B. Partridge capture Bombay at a moment of profound urban and social transformation. Each view is not only a topographical record of a precise location—the Rajabai Clock Tower from the Cooperage Bandstand (1881), the seafront sweep of Nepean Sea Road (1881), and Queen’s Road near the Churchgate level crossing (1883)—but also an ethnographic vignette, populated with promenading Parsis, sari-clad women, porters, and carriages.
Collectively, the works articulate the interplay between colonial civic architecture, coastal landscapes, and everyday life, situating Bombay’s growth within the global modernity of the late Victorian world. The Rajabai Clock Tower anchors the city’s new Gothic skyline; Nepean Sea Road records the elite residential seafront before reclamations remade its topography; and Queen’s Road documents the coexistence of rural crossings and railway modernisation at Churchgate.
Taken together, the trio embodies the picturesque but documentary eye of Partridge—an artist attentive to social types, dress, and gesture—while also serving as invaluable visual evidence of Bombay’s evolution from open esplanade and carriage roads into a densely urbanised metropolis.
(Set of 3)
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