This exhibition tells the story of artists from India, Britain, and China who worked in the era of one of the most powerful corporations in history. The British East India Company began in 1600 as a private trading enterprise but grew into a military and political force during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It waged war to rule India and sell opium in China. To support its commercial and imperial goals, the Company encouraged its agents to commission art. Works of art depicted commodities, functioned as gifts to ease trade deals and build alliances, and visually recorded the places and societies where the Company traded and governed.
The artists featured here trained in Indian courts, in art and military institutes in Britain, and in Chinese workshops. In their artistic exchanges, they combined regional methods with new materials and techniques. This exhibition, of more than one hundred objects, is mostly drawn from the YCBA’s rich collection of works from Asia, including rich opaque watercolors, large-scale oil portraits, evocative architectural drafts and a spectacular thirty-seven-foot-long scroll. It takes visitors on a journey through port cities and into the worlds of artists, showing how artists shaped, and were shaped by, the Company’s ruthless ventures while creating artworks of great beauty and innovation.
Accompanying Publication
Edited by curators Laurel O. Peterson and Holly Shaffer, Painters, Ports, and Profits features more than one hundred objects drawn primarily from the Yale Center for British Art’s collection, including architectural drafts, burnished opaque watercolors, hand-colored aquatints, small and large-scale portraits, and a spectacular thirty-seven-foot-long scroll depicting the city of Lucknow. An international group of scholars, curators, and conservators provide rich commentary based on new research.
Related Programs
First Look | Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850
January 15, 4–5 pm, Lecture Hall and Livestream
Spring Exhibitions Openings
Thursday, February 26, 4 pm, Lecture Hall and Livestream
Curator Tours
Thursdays, January 22, March 26, April 16, May 21, and June 18, 4 pm
Docent Tours
Saturdays, 3 pm
Selected works
Lucknow from the Gomti (detail), Lucknow, India, between 1821 and 1826
Artist once known, Breadnut (Artocarpus camansi), ca. 1825
Bhawani Das, A Great Indian Fruit Bat or Flying Fox (Ptreopus giganteus), 1778 to 1782
Gangaram Chintaman Navgire Tambat, A Rhinoceros in the Peshwa's Menagerie at Poona, 1790
Tilly Kettle, Shuja al-Daula, Nawab of Awadh, 1772
Artist once known, Yellow-eyed Babbler (Chrysomma sinense) Perched on Chinese Hat Plant (Holmskioldia sanguinea), ca. 1770
Tilly Kettle, A Woman Holding a Hookah at Faizabad, India, 1772
Artist once known, A Marriage Procession by Night, Patna, between 1810 and 1840
Circle of Lam Qua, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1850
Top image
Lucknow from the Gomti, Lucknow, India, between 1821 and 1826, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Extended reading
