he unknown photographer who took this photograph c.1860 also recorded two other buildings associated with Tipu Sultan and the Mysore Wars: the great rock and fort at Trichinopoly, scene of action between the French and the British, and the Jumma Masjid built by Tipu at Seringapatam.

Photographic processes had first been explored by amateurs during the 1840s and early 1850s. In the mid-1850s, the collodion process attracted the interest of professionals, and a great wave of enthusiasm for the new medium flooded the market in the 1860s. 'Like soldiering, love of art and a desire to excel actuated many; whilst others, like shadows, moved on in the trail for plunder and profit only' wrote one commentator. These Seringapatam photographs show an elegant mastery of the medium, and are also evidence of the still-flourishing interest in the Tiger of Mysore, years after his death.

The photograph is from a superb collection of some 10,000 objects, covering the period 1843-1918, and including books, albums, prints and daguerrotypes, collected over a period of fory years by Peter Fletcher Riddell (1918-1985) of Glasgow. At his death, his family generously donated the entire collection to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, and thus to the Scottish nation.