Mildred Archer
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Mildred Archer
The Telegraph, UK 03 May 2005
Mildred Archer 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 Congres 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.
Mildred died in 1905, aged 93.
