‘Male Figure at Bameean 200ft high’, 1842 (colour litho)

‘Male Figure at Bameean 200ft high’, 1842. Coloured lithograph after Lieutenant Vincent Eyre, Bengal Artillery, 1842 (c). Eyre sketched this view of the Buddhist shrine at Bamiyan during the period of his capture in the 1st Afghan War (1838-1842). The statues were built in the sixth century by the Kushans and overlooked the Silk Road. The figure of Buddha in the centre of the picture is one of the two large figures destroyed by the Taleban in 2001. As the British advanced into Afghanistan they came across many ancient ruins, evidence of the country’s rich Buddhist past. The religion was introduced to Afghanistan by the Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BC and by the 1st century BC it was the dominant faith. It continued to flourish under the Kushan and Gandharan rulers until the Islamic conquests of the 11th century. From ‘Portraits of the Kabul Prisoners’, a set of pre-publication coloured lithographs later published by John Murray in 1843. The artist’s original drawings were made during his captivity in Afghanistan after the Retreat from Kabul during the 1st Afghan War (1838-1842).