Art, Ambition and Empire
How Britain’s Artists Painted India, 1770–1800
Following the lives of four artists, a beautifully illustrated account of Britain’s artistic interactions with India at the dawn of the Raj.
Description
As the armies of the East India Company were busy transforming Britain into a territorial and ruling power, laying the foundations for the imperial Raj, an artistic ‘Scramble for India’ was taking place.
Art, Ambition and Empire tells the story of the remarkable but little-known artistic encounter between Britain and India in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Between 1769 and the early 1800s, more than sixty British-based artists made the long voyage east. Among them were some of the finest painters of the Golden Age of British art: the portrait painters Tilly Kettle and Johan Zoffany, the landscape artist William Hodges, and the miniaturist Ozias Humphry. Between them, this quartet would produce an extraordinary record of Indian life and landscapes, of Company merchants and military men, and of the courtly world of princely India. The rewards were spectacular, but, as they soon discovered, there was also a personal and a professional price to be paid.
Why did these four artists go to India? How did they respond to the place and represent it in their work? And what role did they play in shaping perceptions of the subcontinent, during one of the most controversial periods of British imperial expansion?
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue: The Colonel, The Artist and the Cock Match
Chapter 1. Failed in London? Try Calcutta!
Chapter 2. Getting to Know the Nawab
Chapter 3. A Master of His Art
Chapter 4. Death in the Desert
Chapter 5. A Clever Good Man
Chapter 6. In Expectation of Sights As Yet Unseen
Chapter 7. Ancient Rites, Modern Revolts
Chapter 8. Old Empires, New Men
Chapter 9. Many Pictures, But Not One
Chapter 10. Calcutta Conversations
Chapter 11. Kit-cats and Cock Pits
Chapter 12. Lucknow 2
Chapter 13. The Golden Point and Compass to Wealth
Chapter 14. I Will Annihilate You!
Chapter 15. Unprotected in a Wide Sea
Chapter 16. The Saviour of India
Chapter 17. On the Line
Chapter 18. The Consequences of War
Epilogue: Our Valhalla
Appendix: Letters on the Taj Mahal
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Author(s)
Robert Baxter is an independent art historian. He lives in Hong Kong.
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