Nursyng and Pundeem: Evening view from Soubahoom. After the first Western artist to depict the Eastern Himalayas during a perilous 600 mile journey.

Sarah Elizabeth Mazuchelli nee Harris, known as Nina, was an aspiring English artist who arrived in India in the same year as the Indian Mutiny of 1857, her husband Francis having been appointed Assistant Chaplain H.M. Indian Service Calcutta. Ten years later they transferred to Darjeeling where Mazuchelli spent a year becoming acquainted with the eastern foothills of the Himalayas accompanied only by her horse and easel.

Having sketched and travelled through most of the mountains of Europe, she soon set her sights on reaching Mount Everest known in Darjeeling as Deodunga or Holy Mountain. Her expedition was made up of Mazuchelli, her husband, ‘C’ - a rather inept district officer and about seventy servants. They travelled west through the valleys to the summit of the Singalila Range then along the crest toward Mount Kanchenjunga in Sikkim and Nepal until they reached Junno Mountain. There was no scientific purpose to the journey and no observations taken on the way and not surprisingly it did not go to plan eventually traversing a perilous 600 miles over two months.

Shortly after her return to Darjeeling and after nearly twenty years in India, Mazuchelli returned to England in 1875. The following year Queen Victoria became Empress of India and Mazuchelli published for a small circle The Indian Alps and how we crossed them with eleven chromolithographs based on her sketches. Having been influenced by the rhetoric of John Ruskin and artistically by JMW Turner, Mazzuchelli sought to convey the feeling a landscape inspired rather than the landscape itself.

Today Mazuchilli is rarely mentioned in the annals of Himalayan adventures. Although she did not reach the summit of Mount Everest, she was the first western women to set eyes upon it but more importantly the first European artist to depict the Eastern Himalayas.