Mildred Archer; scholar of Indian art
Hyfler/Rosner
(Filed: 03/05/2005) Telegraph
Mildred Archer, who has died aged 93, played an important
part with her husband, WG Archer, in reviving interest in
the art of India after the subcontinent achieved
independence in 1947.
When they returned home after more than a decade in Bihar
province, where Bill Archer had served in the Indian Civil
Service, he took charge of the Indian section of the
Victoria and Albert Museum on being assured that he would
have plenty of time to write books in office hours. But when
asked to catalogue "a few miscellaneous paintings" at the
India Office Library in 1954, he was too busy, and he
suggested his wife instead.
During the next quarter century, Mildred Archer turned up a
wealth of material which became the basis for a series of
authoritative studies of the British, Hindu and Muslim
painters whose work varied according to locality and the
different tastes of princely rulers, officials and military
officers.
On arrival at the Library in Whitehall, "Tim" Archer (as
Mildred was known) was handed some tattered albums of
paintings which had belonged to the East India Company, and
given a stool in a small room where staff made the tea. As
she worked away on a draining board, it occurred to her that
the collection was surprisingly meagre for one that had been
acquired over 150 years, and she started to look for more
items. Poking around in corners and cupboards in rooms
adjacent to the Reading Room, she came upon numerous dusty,
brown-paper parcels containing largely unidentified
portfolios of engravings and drawings on paper and mica.
She also found work by Chinese artists in Canton and
sketches of Java collected by India's first
surveyor-general, which had been stuffed up a chimney to
prevent the soot falling down. In the "Iron Room", where
printed books were stored in racks on rails suspended from
the ceiling, she found 27 volumes sent home by Lord
Wellesley, the Governor-General of India and elder brother
of the 1st Duke of Wellington. The job was not without risk,
since she could have been squashed between the careering
racks; the cry would go up, "Are you inside, Mrs Archer?"
The result was a steady stream of books, which impressed
critics. When Terence Mullally reviewed The Natural History
Drawings in the Indian Office Library for The Daily
Telegraph in 1962 he wrote: "No professional art historian
with a string of degrees from continental universities could
have done the job better, but it remains a formidable
achievement of the dedicated amateur."
Mildred Agnes Bell, the daughter of two teachers, was born
on December 28 1911 and met her future husband just before
going up to St Hilda's, Oxford, where she read History and
enjoyed the Left-wing ambience. The couple became engaged
when Archer came home on leave, but they had to wait a
further two years to wed because the Indian Civil Service
disapproved of married junior staff. When she arrived in
Bihar, where Bill was a district officer, Tim Archer had
read EM Forster's A Passage to India, and was bristling with
disapproval of the British community's fixation with club
life and bridge; later she later modified some of her
criticism.
The couple went on tour for weeks at a time, attending
village ceremonies and visiting places that they were later
to recognise in pictures. They enjoyed the richness of
Indian life, such as seeing an old woman carrying a piano
strapped to her head, and having to tie a rope to tree
trunks after their car's brakes failed going downhill.
While they were staying at Ranchi, Tim Archer was asked to
stand in for some local schoolteachers, and was bemused to
discover that she had to use Robert Louis Stevenson's
Child's Garden of Verses. Fuming afterwards that the lines
"And I can hear the thrushes singing/In the lilacs on the
lawn" meant nothing to children who had never seen a thrush,
she was persuaded to produce three textbooks, employing
familiar images for Indian pupils.
When the Archers moved to Purnea, and Tim took on an ayah to
look after their young son and daughter, she borrowed books
from the Imperial Library in Calcutta and started talking to
the old families who had once run profitable indigo
plantations but now reminisced over silver teapots about
"the good old days".
When Bill Archer was put in charge of the 1940 census in
Bihar, they moved to Patna, where they became friends of the
barrister PC Manuk, a collector of miniatures who prompted
them to start collecting themselves. This eventually led to
Tim's first book, Patna Painting (1947), the first study of
the East India Company's art collection.
After the outbreak of war, the atmosphere in India became
increasingly tense, and Bill found himself locking up old
friends. When he and his wife visited one young woman in
jail, they discovered that she had been sent by the Congress
party to investigate "the atrocities of Butcher Archer"
following a riot in which some men had been killed; they
gave her a copy of the New Statesman.
Then, shortly before Independence, Bill was transferred to
the Naga hills, where he had the opportunity to indulge his
anthropological interests among the tribesmen; they clung to
their traditional ways so tenaciously that Tim found herself
travelling in a basket on the back of a tribesman.
On returning to England, the Archers pursued their parallel
careers, co-operating on books in which Bill supplied a dash
of poetic flair that complemented Tim's methodical prose.
Their work included Indian Painting for the British, which
is still the standard survey of the subject (1955); Tipoo's
Tiger, an account of the celebrated musical sculpture that
eats an Englishman (1959); Indian Architecture and the
British (1968); Indian Popular Painting (1977) and Indian
and British Portraiture (1979).
After Bill Archer's sudden death in 1979, Tim Archer
continued to work on further books, co-operating with John
Bastin, Ronald Lightbown and others. In addition to the
articles and prefaces which she periodically wrote about the
artists Thomas and William Daniell, who toured India in the
1790s, she produced, with Toby Falk, Indian Miniatures in
the India Office Library (1981) and India Revealed: the art
and adventures of James and William Fraser 1801-35. Her last
work, India Served and Observed (1994), was a collection of
her and her husband's autobiographical writings.
With Robert Skelton, of the Victoria and Albert Museum, she
undertook a survey of the works of art to be found in
official buildings in India; they recommended that none
should be thrown out, and expressed reservations about the
introduction of air-conditioning in the Indian climate.
Tim Archer was appointed OBE in 1979.