A botanical group in Lahore, 1864

摘要

The sitters in a previously misunderstood nineteenth-century Indian group photograph are identified as four East India Company surgeons with wider interests in natural history: William Jameson, Thomas Caverhill Jerdon, John Lindsay Stewart and Hugh Francis Clarke Cleghorn, taken in Lahore at the Punjab Exhibition of 1864. The image was previously believed to depict the committee of the Madras Literary Society and to have been taken in Madras. No portraits of Jameson or Stewart have previously been known, and Jameson had mistakenly been identified as E. G. Balfour. Brief biographies are given of the individuals figured, the circumstances under which they coincided in Lahore explained, and their roles in forest conservation and the documentation of Indian biodiversity outlined. The photographer is confirmed as Samuel Bourne, and information is provided on the Scottish individuals to whom Cleghorn sent copies of the photograph.