John Martin
View of the Temple of Suryah & Fountain of Maha Dao, with a Distant View of North Side of Mansion House
Etching with aquatint added by Frederick Christian Lewis (1779–1856), in Martin's series of views of Sezincote, ca. 1818.
Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987
The artist Thomas Daniell (1749–1840) introduced architectural elements from India into the English garden on the basis of scenery and monuments he had sketched in the course of a ten-year tour of the Subcontinent. When Sir Charles Cockerell, a "nabob" made wealthy by three decades with the East India Company, built a new house at Sezincote in a fusion of Hindu and Mogul styles, Daniell transformed a part of the garden into a dream of India in the Cotswolds, with a shrine to the Hindu sun god beside a lotus-shaped pool with sacral fountain. The temple housed a figure of Surya cast in Coade & Seeley's Patent Imitation Stone.