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William Baillie (1752/3–Calcutta 1799) was a British artist working in India in the late 18th century.
William Baillie was born in 1752 or 1753.[1] He went to India as a cadet in the Bengal Infantry in 1777, transferred to the Engineers in 1778 and participated in surveying work along the Hooghly River.[2]
He went on leave without pay in 1785 and the next year started a weekly newspaper, the Calcutta Chronicle. He finally resigned from the army in 1788 with the intention of pursuing a career as an artist,[2] but in 1792 he became secretary of the Free School Society in Calcutta[2] and superintendent of the school itself.[3] In the same year he published his "Plan of Calcutta", a reduced version of a map made by Lt. Col. Mark Wood in 1784–5.[4] In 1794 he published a set of hand-coloured aquatints entitled Twelve Views of Calcutta.[1][2][5] The plates, each measuring 15 by 11 inches, were advertised as "executed in the manner of stained drawings". [6] A further set of eight prints "of the ruins of Gour and Rajmehal" was announced as completed in 1798, but no impressions have been traced.[7]
In a letter of 1795 he told his fellow-artist Ozias Humphry that he had wasted a lot of time painting landscapes, adding that "it is a pleasing pursuit, but not a pot-boiling one."[8] He died in Calcutta in 1799 at the age of 46.[2]
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