Figure 1.1 William Hodges, ‘A View of the Fort of Agra’, Select Views in India, Drawn on the Spot, in the Years 1780, 1781, 1782, and 1783, and Executed in Aqua Tinta, plate 15, 1785–88 (X 744(15))
The East India Company and British Views of India
Eighteenth-century India was ‘the theatre of scenes highly important’ to Britain.1 So wrote the artist and traveller William Hodges. He was in a good position to judge. Hodges was one of the first British professional landscape painters to visit India, spending six years there under the patronage of Warren Hastings, the most important British official in the subcontinent. As well as painting portraits and creating other works for Hastings, Hodges undertook extensive travels throughout India. And all of these experiences were documented in sketches and drawings, many of which were later worked up into finished oil paintings or published as prints (Fig. 1.1).
In matters of trade and war, the Indian subcontinent had assumed an increasingly important role in British political and economic life in the second half of the eighteenth century. This relationship between Britain and India was complex and had its roots in the activities of a London-based trading company. The ‘Company of Merchants of London, trading to the East Indies’ – usually abbreviated as the East India Company – controlled British trade with Asia from its foundation in 1600 until the nineteenth century, and was once described as ‘the wealthiest and most powerful commercial corporation of ancient or modern times’. Any examination of Britain’s relationship with India must take account of this extraordinary organisation.2 By the time Hodges was working, the Company had become a powerful economic and political player there. And its influence was felt not just in Asia. The Company’s commercial, political and military activities altered the way politicians and merchants in Britain thought about the wider world. Ultimately, it helped to lay the foundations of the British Raj. If the American colonies and Caribbean islands had once captured the British imagination, the commercial possibilities offered by the Indian subcontinent increasingly occupied British politicians, merchants and travellers as the eighteenth century neared its end.
But the ‘intimate connection’, as Hodges termed it, between India and Britain was not just a commercial or political one.3 It was also an intensely visual one. The historian P. J. Marshall reminds us that the British encounter with India was ‘prolonged and intense’, and that it was concerned with cultural exchange as well as commercial endeavour and exploitation:
Even by 1800, thousands of Englishmen had been to India, a huge flow of trade had developed (including the import of artefacts of high artistic quality), many books about India had been published in Britain and visual representations of India and Indians were being widely reproduced.4
James Rennell’s much reprinted Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan, which first appeared in 1783, offers visual evidence of this (Fig. 1.2). It gave the public in Britain an image of India in which, as Rennell put it, ‘no considerable blanks’ remained.5 It was a time, in other words, in which Europeans attempted to fill the linguistic, cultural and visual gaps in their knowledge of India. Images played a crucial part in this process. The visual variety of the subcontinent presented so many ‘valuable subjects for the painter’ that it attracted a host of artists and travellers keen to record, depict and bear witness.6 Indeed, these artists helped to document and celebrate the richness and sophistication of Indian culture that later nineteenth-century views often denied. Artists contributed to the work of intellectual engagement with India, offering a parallel to activities in other disciplines such as cartography, comparative linguistics and topographical surveying. Like other European travellers and commentators, the British artists who depicted India in the period took their own expectations, preconceptions and prejudices with them, based on their artistic training, popular notions of taste and the prevailing political sentiments in Europe. Nevertheless these images, produced in the late eighteenth-century heyday of the East India Company, reflect its significance and the impact of its activities on Indians and Britons alike.
Figure 1.1 William Hodges, ‘A View of the Fort of Agra’, Select Views in India, Drawn on the Spot, in the Years 1780, 1781, 1782, and 1783, and Executed in Aqua Tinta, plate 15, 1785–88 (X 744(15))
Among the artists who arrived on India’s shores, Hodges was one of the most influential. He had served as the official expedition artist on James Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific in 1772–5, and he exhibited regularly at the Free Society of Artists and the Royal Academy in London. His work offers some of the most striking insights into the ways in which British artists engaged with India, and we will encounter him and his work repeatedly in subsequent chapters. But he was not unique. This book charts the impact of India on a variety of British artists and travellers who, like Hodges, were fascinated by the sights and scenes before their eyes. And it also considers the impact of their work on audiences and viewers. While many aspects of the East India Company’s story have been discussed by historians, few have considered the visual sources that survive and what they tell us about the connections between images and empire, pictures and power. This book draws on the unrivalled riches of the British Library – both visual and textual – to tell that history. It weaves together the story of individual images, their creators, and the people and events they depict. And, in doing so, it presents a detailed picture of the complex relationship between British artists and the people, places and cultures they encountered in India.
‘A PERFECT PARADISE’
The attraction of India for artists was summed up by Ozias Humphry, who travelled to the subcontinent in the hope of finding artistic fame and worldly riches there: ‘I think it is a blessed and glorious country, for the purpose we all visit it, and superior to any other upon earth.’7 William Hodges described the sheer visual opulence that struck him as soon as he arrived at Madras:
The clear, blue, cloudless sky, the polished white buildings, the bright sandy beach, and the dark green sea, present a combination totally new to the eye of the Englishman, just arrived from London, who, accustomed to the sight of the rolling masses of clouds floating in a damp atmosphere, cannot but contemplate the difference with delight: and the eye being thus gratified, the mind soon assumes a gay and tranquil habit, analogous to the pleasing objects with which it is surrounded.8
The eye of the artist was naturally drawn to the contrasts in colour and light that greeted Europeans in India. As we will see, Hodges and his colleagues did much to capture and convey this impression to their audiences in Europe. Indeed, Hodges had been recommended to Warren Hastings as someone desirous of recording ‘the most curious appearances of nature and art in Asia’.9 And he was equally charmed by Madras in the moonlight: ‘Such a scene appears more like a tale of enchantment than a reality, to the imagination of a stranger just arrived.’10 He found Bengal to be ‘a perfect paradise’.11 Elsewhere, the scenery assumed what James Forbes called ‘a sublime aspect’: ‘the landscape is varied by stupendous heights, narrow glens, dark woods, and impenetrable jungles’.12 And in A Picturesque Tour along the Rivers Ganges and Jumna, published in 1824, Charles Ramus Forrest wrote about the way in which he drew and coloured on the spot ‘while the magic effects of the scenes represented were still impressed on his mental vision’. He hoped ‘the reader will recollect with indulgence, that the colouring of the views, which so far exceeds that of the scenery of Europe, is but a just portrait of the enchanting features of India, eternally glowing in the brilliant glory of the resplendent Asiatic sun’.13
Some artists were undoubtedly also attracted by the wealth that they anticipated acquiring. According to one of his contemporaries, when he departed for India in 1783, Johan Zoffany fully expected ‘to roll in gold dust’.14 While Zoffany’s sojourn in India was reasonably successful, not every artist found it equally lucrative or rewarding. Ozias Humphry ultimately set out on the advice of his friend, the engraver Sir Robert Strange. Sailing for Calcutta in 1785, Humphry was plagued by misfortune in India. His letters reveal anxieties about professional rivals as well as the hazards of business for a commercial artist working in the city. In April 1786 he complained to his brother in London that ‘the times are not favourable for artists in India’.15 He bemoaned his clients, European and Indian alike. Although he obtained a commission to paint the Nawab of Awadh and his courtiers at Lucknow in 1786, Humphry never received the fee of 47,000 rupees that was owed to him. And the climate took its toll on his health too. He arrived in Calcutta in November 1786, after eight months and a journey of nearly 3,000 miles upcountry, feeling that the climate had injured his health and damaged his eyesight. Ultimately, Humphry returned to London in 1787, a despondent and dejected figure. But others were more successful and revelled in the artistic inspiration they found all around them. For Thomas and William Daniell, their images were ‘guiltless spoliations’, apparently unconnected with a ‘thirst for gold’ or ‘commercial speculations’.16
The story of Thomas Daniell and his nephew, William, gives a sense of how deeply intertwined the East India Company, the Indian subcontinent and its representation in visual images had become. The Daniells, like William Hodges, were instrumental in bringing India to audiences in Britain and making the country a subject for mainstream art there. One contemporary complimented the works of Thomas Daniell as ‘increasing our enjoyment by bringing scenes to our fireside, too distant to visit, and too singular to be imagined’.17 The influence of their work was extensive and enduring, and it can be seen in representations of India until the middle of the nineteenth century and beyond. Thomas Daniell was born near London in 1749. The son of an innkeeper, he was initially apprenticed to a coach builder. His artistic talents began to flourish when he worked for Charles Catton, coach painter to George III, between 1770 and 1773. Thomas subsequently enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools in 1773 and exhibited a number of pictures there over the next decade. However, his big break came when he received permission from the East India Company in 1784 to work as an ‘engraver’ in India. His nephew, William, travelled with him as his assistant and apprentice.
The Daniells worked primarily in Calcutta, the leading British commercial city in India by this time and one that, as we will see, was the basis for the Company’s power in much of the rest of the country. There they restored paintings in the Council House and the Old Court House. They also produced the first topographical series of prints recording different scenes and prospects in this rapidly expanding commercial metropolis. Published as Views of Calcutta between 1786 and 1788, the twelve prints were engraved and coloured with the help of Indian artists. According to contemporary sources, they proved very popular among both Indian and European audiences. Claude Martin remarked that ‘everybody has approved [their] Calcutta views’.18 William Hodges thought that they offered excellent descriptions of ‘the mixture of European and Asiatic manners, which may be observed in Calcutta’. They also included scenes of daily life: ‘coaches, phaetons, single horse chaises, with the pallankeens and hackeries of the natives – the passing ceremonies of the Hindoos – the different appearances of the fakirs – [which] form a sight perhaps more novel and extraordinary than any city in the world can present to a stranger.’19 The Daniells captured the scenes of hustle and bustle in this thriving metropolis, translating the descriptions of travellers into visual images. For example, Thomas Twining’s account of the scene that met him on arriving at Calcutta in 1792 found visual expression in ‘The Old Fort, Ghaut’, the sixth print in the Daniells’ series (Fig. 1.3):
Figure 1.3 Thomas Daniell and William Daniell, ‘The Old Fort, Ghaut’, Views of Calcutta, plate 6, 1787 (P92)
Figure 1.4 Thomas Daniell and William Daniell, ‘Calcutta from the River Hooghly: Gentoo Buildings’, Views of Calcutta, plate 8, 1788 (P47)
I quitted the boat at a spacious sloping ghaut or landing-place, close to the north-west angle of the old fort. The lower slope went some way into the water, and was crowded with natives, men and women, bathing with their clothes, or rather cloths on, and which they dexterously contrived to change under water, without embarrassment to themselves or the bystanders.20
Their view of ‘Calcutta from the River Hooghly’ conveyed a similarly lively scene with the crowded river bustling with all sorts of craft (Fig. 1.4). In the centre is a pinnace budgerow, of the type used by the Daniells themselves, flying a Union flag. So-called ‘country boats’, or indigenous craft, with bamboo decks and great rudders can be seen all around, and a horse-headed pleasure craft is also visible. Meanwhile the shore is lined with the houses and warehouses on which the commercial success of the city depended. Scenes like these, captured and conveyed so powerfully in the graphic work of these artists, played a big part in making the Company’s commercial and political activity in India – half the world away from Britain – a reality for viewers.
But it was not only in the commercial heart of East India Company power in the subcontinent that British artists worked. Just as Hodges travelled extensively, so too did the Daniells play a vital role in visually documenting a wide geographical and cultural range of sites across India. In fact, they travelled more than any of their contemporaries, earning the title ‘artist-adventurers’. The Daniells made three tours: a trip from Calcutta to Srinagar (1788–91), a circular tour from Mysore to Madras (1792–3) and a visit to Bombay and its temple sites (1793). They sketched, drew and painted as they travelled. On returning to Calcutta after their first expedition, the uncle and nephew team produced 150 oil paintings, which they sold by public lottery. As well as spreading visual information about the country among British residents in Bengal, their efforts also enabled them to finance a second tour, to Mysore in southern India. This region had recently been the scene of an intense battle for political dominance, played out between Hyder Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan, and the East India Company. A second lottery, comprising sixty-eight oil paintings and eight drawings, was drawn in Madras in February 1793. This funded their third and final tour. On this occasion, the Daniells travelled to western India. Throughout their time in India, and in addition to recording the landscapes and people that they encountered, they also restored and completed pictures for Europeans, experimented with copperplate engraving and occasionally made pencil portrait sketches.
Like many of the artists discussed in this book, the impact and importance of the Daniells’ work was not confined to India. It also made a lasting impression back in Britain. Indeed, the work of these ‘two artists of splendid talents’ was seen in Britain long before they returned from India. In 1788, for example, William Hickey entrusted ‘a present for my brother’ to Philip Yonge, a barrister returning to Europe for the sake of his health: ‘twelve views of different parts of Calcutta, drawn and engraved in aqua tinta by Messrs Daniell’.21 The Daniells returned to London in September 1794, where they began to make use of the hundreds of drawings and sketches that they had taken in India, working them up into watercolours, prints and finished oil paintings. Their output was astonishing. Every year between 1795 and 1838, one or other of them exhibited pictures at the Royal Academy and the British Institution, important venues for the display of art in London. They also embarked on a vast project and spent the next thirteen years making 144 aquatints for a publication entitled Oriental Scenery. This work was published in six parts between 1795 and 1808 and cost a colossal £210 a set. Uncle and nephew engraved all the plates themselves and probably did some of the colouring too. One of the most comprehensive records of Indian life at the time, the prints represent Mughal and Dravidian (southern Indian) architecture and monuments, cityscapes and sublime views of mountains and waterfalls. Oriental Scenery represents the most extensive work of its kind, and it attracted subscribers throughout Britain, as well as in Calcutta and Madras. William Daniell later confessed that for seven years after he returned from India he worked daily from six in the morning until midnight. And they did not stop here. In 1810 they published A Picturesque Voyage to India by the Way of China, and over the years they also produced many single plates for publications, such as the Oriental Annual. But it was Oriental Scenery that acted as the ultimate guide for future artistic travellers wanting to follow in their footsteps. Its large-scale format, the number of plates and the use of colour printing were greatly admired and emulated by those who saw them. Little wonder then that when William Simpson was commissioned to go to India to make drawings for a series of 250 lithographs for Day and Son – to record scenes of the great tumult there in the late 1850s – he prepared by looking at images in the India Office Library made by Hodges and the Daniells.
It was not just professional European artists – like the Daniells or William Hodges – who helped to broker the relationship with India and bring scenes of Indian life and landscapes to the attention of British viewers. East India Company officials were often keen on employing local Indian artists. The Maratha artist Gangaram Chintaman Tambat, for example, compiled an album of sketches and drawings for Charles Warre Malet of the Bombay Civil Service (Fig. 1.5). Gangaram was probably trained at the drawing academy established by the Maratha Peshwa at his court in Poona. Similarly, the ‘Wellesley Album’ (see Chapter 5), now in the collection of the India Office, consists of some 138 drawings depicting monuments, manners and customs which were almost certainly done by Indian artists working in Calcutta in the 1790s (Fig. 1.6).
It is also important to remember that much of the visual recording of India was undertaken by amateurs: only about 10 per cent of the visual material in the collection of the India Office was done by professional artists. Amateurs had to work without the extensive classical training, encouragement and patronage enjoyed by their professional peers. East India Company military officers were taught drawing at Addiscombe, the Company’s military college, as part of their general training. But it only offered a basic introduction and, when they got to India, few amateurs had access to professional artists for advice and support. James Forbes, for example, arrived as a sixteen-year-old in 1765 and recalled his predicament: ‘India was formerly not the resort of artists; when there I had little to excite emulation, and no other instruction than a few friendly hints from Sir Archibald Campbell; who, during a short residence at Bombay … encouraged my juvenile [artistic] pursuits.’22 And all of these artists – amateur and professional, Asian and European – had to overcome the climate, the danger of disease, and the difficult terrain and travelling conditions to make a remarkable record of the East India Company and British engagement with India.
IMAGES AND EMPIRE
The work of these artists helped to make visual sense of a country that would become a jewel in the crown of Britain’s Victorian empire. As well as providing a record of time and travels in India, and the sheer visual delight these places evoked in those who documented them, the images produced by travelling, professional and amateur artists also reveal a great deal about the conditions and contexts in which they were created.
Figure 1.7 John McClean ‘Ruins of the Citadel in Pondicherry after the Attack by the British’, 1762 (WD1293)
A simple pen, ink and wash drawing by an amateur artist, John McClean, suggests some of the ways in which images can illuminate our understanding of the British engagement with India in the period (Fig. 1.7). McClean was a military man. He had travelled to India in 1762 as an ensign in the Madras Engineers. His faculty in visual recording probably derives from this training rather than from any artistic ambitions. But his image of the citadel in Pondicherry introduces many of the ideas and motifs that characterise the depiction of India by other British artists at the time. One of the most intriguing aspects is the artist’s inclusion of himself in the image. McClean depicted himself sketching in the foreground. This operates as a kind of visual guarantee of authenticity, reassuring the viewer of the truthfulness of the image by placing its creator in a prominent position. Accuracy was valued and its achievement frequently underlined. Many of the artists who travelled in the subcontinent were at pains to point out how objective their visual records were, and how they reinforced, and even surpassed, the textual and written accounts. William Hodges is a case in point. The remarks that he made on his travels represented ‘a few plain observations, noted down upon the spot, in the simple garb of truth, without the smallest embellishment from fiction, or from fancy’. And he continued: ‘The drawings, from which the plates for this work are engraved, I have already mentioned were made upon the spot; and, to the utmost of my ability, are fair and accurate representations of the original.’23 Nevertheless, they were still the products of their time, where aesthetic considerations and artistic training worked together to influence the way in which views were produced.
At first glance, then, this might appear to be a completely objective record of the scene. But McClean’s image might also have symbolic resonances: viewers would have been aware that drawing or contemplating the ruins of fallen empires was an evocative theme, laden with ideas about the transience of life and the fleeting nature of all human endeavour. Jemima Kindersley, one of the first British women to publish her experiences of travel in India, remarked on the ‘ruinous’ surroundings of Pondicherry in June 1765. The city ‘fills me with a sort of pleasing melancholy; one feels a kind of reverence and pity for ruined grandeur, even in things inanimate: a small part of the palace remains standing, but not more than two houses in the whole town. And those, as well as the noble fortifications, [are] in a shattered condition.’24
Finally, the context in which the image was produced is also important. Quite apart from any symbolism or artistic licence employed in its creation, the image records a key moment in the East India Company’s rise to power in India. Pondicherry was a French trading fort on the east coast that was captured by the British during the Seven Years War, a global struggle between the two emerging superpowers. British victories in North America and the Caribbean, as well as in the seas off Europe, were vital in winning the war. But the parallel successes of British arms in India helped to propel the East India Company to its dominant position in the subcontinent. Sir Eyre Coote, who led the assault on Pondicherry, had already steered his troops to victory over the French at Wandiwash and Arcot before they laid siege to Pondicherry. After a blockade lasting some eight months, the French finally surrendered on 16 January 1761. McClean’s image captures the aftermath of the devastating siege. Although his career in the subcontinent was sadly short-lived – he died near Madras in February 1768 – this image encapsulates many of the intertwined themes of art and empire that we will explore throughout this book.
Figure 1.8 John Johnson, Waterfall near Haliyal with Johnson Sketching in the Foreground, 1801 (WD1055, f. 32)
Similar themes can be found in a watercolour painted nearly forty years later by Captain John Johnson of the Bombay Engineers (Fig. 1.8). Like McClean, Johnson also represented himself in the foreground of the image, underlining his role as a reliable eyewitness of the scene laid out before him and us. This image was also made in the aftermath of a British military victory, created shortly after the British had finally defeated Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore and one of the most tenacious opponents of British rule in the subcontinent. That conflict attracted considerable artistic attention: the Daniells, as we have seen, travelled to Mysore in the 1790s to gather inspiration and make records. Others prepared large canvases on the subject for exhibition in Britain. But Johnson was not a professional artist. And, unlike McClean’s depiction of rubble and ruins, there is little evidence of the extensive and intense fighting. A tree forms a natural visual bracket for the waterfall that occupies the main focus of the scene. And, yet, the visual charm of the image needs to be seen in the context of Johnson’s role as an engineer, charged with constructing the kinds of engineering projects and military surveillance that formed part of his everyday work and that helped to defeat Tipu and his troops. Aesthetic considerations and artistic composition undoubtedly played a role in creating all of these images, but they sit side by side with the unfolding drama of the Company’s rise to power in India.
ART AND BRITISH INDIA
The expansion of the East India Company’s activities in the subcontinent and the number of permanent British residents there created a market for pictures within India. The success of the Daniells, mainly among the small European resident community, bears out this point. But, as early as 1770, Baron Carl von Imhoff, the first husband of Warren Hastings’s wife Marian, remarked on how profitable painting was in Calcutta. People were, apparently, willing to pay huge prices.25 When Catherine Read arrived in Calcutta in 1777, her prospects looked promising. In February 1778 Major Kyd was ‘confident (not in my own opinion alone, but on Mrs Hastings’s also) that you will have every reason to be satisfied in point of emolument from the exercises of painting’ in Calcutta.26 As Britain’s ties with India deepened, the number of artists there expanded exponentially: in 1792 Gavin Hamilton in Calcutta mentioned Robert Home, Arthur William Devis, John Alefounder, Frans Balthazar Solvyns, as well as Thomas and William Daniell.27 The following year, William Baillie, another of Ozias Humphry’s artistic contacts in India, wrote about many of the same people, adding news of Mrs Hill, John Smart and Mrs Baxter.28
But many of these artists were not only interested in appealing to Indian residents. They wanted to sell their works to audiences in Britain too. As a result, representations of India by artists who had been there became an equally powerful force in shaping British perceptions of the region. There was certainly a popular appetite for such descriptions and depictions in Europe. James Rennell, writing in 1788, remarked that ‘almost every particular relating to Hindoostan is become an object of popular curiosity’ in Britain.29 On some occasions, the images were produced, exhibited and sold in Britain. But they were also sent directly from India. Benjamin Mee, a financier in Calcutta, introduced depictions of India to European viewers by sending views by ‘Mr Daniel’ to his sister and brother-in-law back in England.30 These images, and their visual impact, had effects elsewhere in Europe. The great traveller Alexander von Humboldt maintained that Hodges’s Indian views had encouraged him to travel. He credited seeing ‘paintings by Hodge [sic] in the house of Warren Hastings in London, representing the banks of the Ganges’ as one of the youthful experiences that ‘awakened … the first beginnings of an inextinguishable longing to visit the tropics’.31
The example of William Hodges is instructive, as his work had a profound impact on the way European audiences came to regard India. Hodges exhibited twenty-five paintings at the Royal Academy between 1785 and 1794: he exhibited eight Indian landscapes at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1786 alone. Forty-eight aquatints – a type of etching that produced finished prints that resembled watercolours – were published between 1785 and 1788 in his Select Views in India, and fourteen engravings based on paintings and drawings illustrated his book, Travels in India (1793). The final bound volume of Select Views covered the entire range of Hodges’s experience in India. The prints were often hand-coloured by Hodges himself, and they represent the kind of high-quality, prestigious commercial venture designed to appeal to the rising interest in India in Britain. The images frequently show sites that refer to recent events associated with the British in India, particularly military successes. Taken together, the prints in Hodges’s Select Views offer a very positive interpretation of the East India Company and its activities in India.
Hodges and the Daniells exhibited their work at grand art exhibitions in London. But they were joined by many other artists whom we shall encounter below. For example, Francis Swain Ward, who had gone to India in 1757 as a lieutenant, exhibited Indian landscapes at the Society of Artists between 1765 and 1773. And it was not just at the heart of artistic society that representations of the subcontinent appeared. Indian pictures appeared in as many as 20 per cent of all the house sales managed by Christie’s. The market in prints and illustrated books also helped to foster an interest among wealthy readers in Europe. As we have seen, the six volumes of Thomas and William Daniell’s Oriental Scenery, published between 1795 and 1808, conveyed images of the subcontinent to a wide British public. Using prints was a common route for artists seeking a broader audience and a wider appeal for their work. Thomas Longcroft, a young artist who lived with Zoffany in India, sent home drawings to be engraved, according to Gavin Hamilton.32 James Forbes’s Oriental Memoirs (1813), Captain Thomas Williamson’s Oriental Field Sports (1819), Charles D’Oyly’s Costumes of India (1830) and Emily Eden’s Portraits of the Princes and Peoples of India (1844) indicate the continued popularity of images and texts in presenting the British engagement with India in the early nineteenth century.
Images charting the rise of the Company’s power and the increasing British engagement with the subcontinent circulated in a number of other contexts too. In many cases, the artists responsible had never been to India or witnessed the scenes or events being depicted. But the public interest demonstrates the popular fascination with the subcontinent and British exploits there. For example, Francis Hayman painted four canvases to adorn the annexe of the Rotunda at the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in 1762, one of which depicted Lord Clive meeting Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, an event which heralded the beginnings of Company control in India. A few decades later, the fall of Tipu Sultan in 1799 inspired much visual as well as political interest in Britain. Popular panoramas, history paintings depicting Tipu’s death, a profusion of prints, and popular exhibitions contributed to this phenomenon. Robert Ker Porter capitalised on the public fascination by painting a 120-foot-long panorama in just six weeks. Depicted on a semi-circular plane, the Storming of Seringapatam was a pictorial reconstruction of the fourth Anglo-Mysore War. When it went on display at the Lyceum Theatre, on the Strand, it transported viewers to the scene. One contemporary, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, commented that ‘you seemed to be listening to the groans of the wounded and the dying’, whose ‘red hot blood’ was spilled all over the canvas. The realism of the scene produced ‘a sight that was altogether as marvellous as it was novel. You carried it home, and did nothing but think of it, talk of it, and dream of it.’33 India inspired the compilation of a vast and diverse corpus of visual material.
PICTURING INDIA
One of the strongest themes running through this book, then, is the sheer visual impact of India, its people and places on British artists. In addition to its extensive commercial and political activities, the East India Company nurtured the careers of professional artists like William Hodges, Johan Zoffany, and Thomas and William Daniell. European artists painted the Company’s new possessions, portrayed its servants and decorated its headquarters in London. Their work brought British audiences face to face with strange places and unfamiliar scenes. By exploring the extraordinary body of visual evidence created by these events, Picturing India sketches out the transformation of the East India Company from trader to sovereign in the space of a few decades.
The following chapters represent crucial aspects of Britain’s engagement with the subcontinent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the ways in which they were depicted in images. Visual records of the Company’s activities in India testify to shifting British attitudes towards the wider world, as well as to the power of images to preserve and convey momentous political and social changes. But these images also record the excitement and wonder of their creators in the face of natural beauty, as well as preserving and expressing the human interactions and encounters at the heart of the story. In their breadth and variety, then, the images in this book and the stories associated with them illustrate the capacity of art to reflect the complex nuances of Britain’s relationship with the subcontinent in the period.
Chapter 2 introduces the story of the Company and the broader historical context of its rise from a trading enterprise to a territorial power. It charts the geographical extent of the Company’s operations, its maritime connections and the places where its ships called. In doing so, it suggests the role that images played in presenting the evolving story of the Company to the viewing public. The discussion pays particular attention to those ports on the coast of India that were so vital to the East India Company’s trading world. The Company’s power was intimately entwined with these coastal cities, where early Company endeavours established tenuous footholds only with the blessing and help of local Indian rulers. Soon, however, these ‘factories’ became bridgeheads, facilitating greater expansion and commercial penetration into the interior. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the landscapes of India were opening to the British gaze.
In their explorations of the people and places that defined the Company’s engagement with India, Chapters 3 and 4 are especially rich in visual images. At the heart of this story was a profound visual interest in the landscapes of India. The long-established themes and tropes of landscape scenery as it was seen in Europe – beautiful, picturesque and sublime by turn – were transferred to the subcontinent. And the artists who came to depict these scenes were increasingly of the first rank: professional, influential and well connected. But if places in India attracted artistic attention, so too did the people associated with East India Company rule there. Company men – officials and soldiers, governors and generals – were depicted by artists keen to earn professional respect and financial rewards, using the time-honoured traditions of portrait painting. But there is also a small band of Indians, from all ranks of life, whose images adorn the Company’s archives. In all of these portraits, the stance, gestures and expressions of the sitter, together with the accoutrements and objects surrounding them, offer a carefully constructed image of these individuals and their role in the Company’s world.
All of these artistic representations need to be seen, of course, in the context of this private trading company whose control became so powerful and ultimately corrosive. Chapter 5 brings the discussion back to Britain, exploring some of the ways in which the patronage of art by the East India Company and its officials brought views of India into circulation in Britain. The commissioning of a portrait by a Company official for his country house and the purchase of a set of prints were just some of the ways in which the Company and its activities influenced art in Britain. This chapter also considers the Company’s crucial role as a patron of art and conveyor of information about India in its own right. The Company’s commissions for its London headquarters offer an ideal lens through which to view the way in which art and architecture worked to define financial might, commercial wealth and political power. By investigating the visual language of the Company’s headquarters, this chapter suggests that East India House, in Leadenhall Street at the heart of the City of London, acted as a visual symbol of the Company’s power and prestige. But, in order to understand the origins of that power and prestige, we need to return to India and to assess the Company’s involvement in power politics and port cities in the subcontinent.
