Benares

Marius Bauer spent about six months travelling through India in 1897 and 1898, and he was still painting what he had seen there 15 years later. This large canvas of Benares, the ancient city on the Ganges, dates from 1913. It shows a stretch of the ghats, the broad flights of stone steps that run down into the river, with the Brij Rama Palace rising on the right. The city stands in full sun. A woman bathes with a child at the water's edge, other figures are scattered up the steps, and rowers push a boat off into the stream. In Bauer's India, as the Rijksmuseum notes, there is no room for suffering or poverty, and this crowded riverbank shows neither.