Philip Lawson comments in the foreword to his general history of the East India Company that ‘it would take several lifetimes to read all that exists today’ on the subject (Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History (London: Longman, 1993), p. viii). The literature on the Company – the principal commercial and political conduit connecting India and Britain for over two centuries – is vast, and it continues to grow. Indeed, in recent years, scholarly interest in the activities of this company, and its influence on the development of the British Empire, has expanded exponentially. In addition to Lawson’s book, readers with an interest in the general history of the Company will find useful introductions in: John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London: HarperCollins, 1993); Nick Robins, The Corporation that Changed the World (London: Pluto Press, 2006); Anthony Farrington, Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia, 1600–1834 (London: British Library, 2002); H. V. Bowen, John McAleer and Robert J. Blyth, Monsoon Traders: The Maritime World of the East India Company (London: Scala, 2011).
More detailed studies of the complex relationship between the East India Company, British rule in India and the history of the British Empire more generally can be found in the work of P. J. Marshall and H. V. Bowen. See, for example, P. J. Marshall, ‘British Expansion in India: A Historical Revision’, History 60 (1975), pp. 28–43; P. J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); P. J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India, 1740–1828 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757–1773 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
On the history of the British engagement with India more generally, see Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), especially pp. 67–184; Douglas M. Peers and Nandini Gooptu (eds), India and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). On the wider imperial context, see P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989).
The India Office Records at the British Library is the official repository of the East India Company’s archives. In addition to fourteen kilometres of shelves containing official documents, letters and journals, the British Library also holds the world’s premier collection of visual images recording the British encounter with the subcontinent. Picturing India draws on these unparalleled resources, highlighting the riches of the collection. In terms of other manuscripts sources, the letters of Ozias Humphry, in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts, were useful in adding personal detail and offering the perspective of one artist who made the long and arduous journey to India in pursuit of fame and fortune.
A number of publications have explored facets of the British visual representation of India before. Sir William Foster offered one of the earliest accounts in a long article on ‘British Artists in India, 1760–1820’, which appeared in the Walpole Society over eighty years ago (vol. 19 (1930–1), pp. 1–88). Picturing India builds most obviously on the magisterial work of Mildred Archer, formerly of the India Office Library. Her most impressive books, such as Company Drawings in the India Office Library (London: HMSO, 1972), India and British Portraiture, 1770–1825 (London: Sotheby’s, 1979) and The India Office Collection of Paintings and Sculpture (London: British Library, 1986), are long out of print. However, their erudition has provided the basis for most of the subsequent scholarship on the subject. These books were complemented by a series of articles, all of which were useful in writing this book. See, for example, ‘British Patrons of Indian Artists’, Country Life 118 (18 August 1955), pp. 340–1, and ‘The East India Company and British Art’, Apollo 82 (1965), pp. 401–9.
A number of well-illustrated catalogues have been published over the years. See Mildred Archer and Ronald Lightbown, India Observed: India as Viewed by British Artists, 1760–1860 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1982); Pratapaditya Pal and Vidya Dehejia, From Merchants to Emperors: British Artists and India, 1757–1930 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986); Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer (eds), Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500–1800 (London: V&A Publications, 2004). One of the most important exhibitions in recent times to explore the complex interactions between the East India Company, Britain, and India was The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947, held at the National Portrait Gallery in 1990. It confronted the complexities of this history, and the material culture and visual representations it produced. The exhibition tackled themes of representation through the selection, display and juxtaposition of a range of paintings, miniatures and other objects. The accompanying catalogue, Raj: The British and India (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1990), edited by C. A. Bayly, brings together a wealth of visual material that sheds light on Britain’s centuries-long encounter and engagement with the subcontinent.
More recent studies include Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin, Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006); Romita Ray, Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013); Natasha Eaton, Mimesis across Empires: Artworks and Networks in India, 1765–1860 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). On Mughal art, and the influence of East India Company activity on Indian art more generally, see Jeremiah P. Losty and Malini Roy, Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire (London: British Library, 2012).
PLACES
For a general introduction to the history, meaning and interpretation of landscape in Western art, see Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). For an excellent overview of the representation of landscape across almost the entire geographical range of the British Empire, see John E. Crowley, Imperial Landscapes: Britain’s Global Visual Culture, 1745–1820 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011). Chapter 6 of Crowley’s book (pp. 169–203) deals specifically with India. For further discussion in relation to the representation of landscape by British artists in India, see Pauline Rohatgi and Pheroza Godrej (eds), Under the Indian Sun: British Landscape Artists (Bombay: Marg, 1995); Giles Tillotson, The Artificial Empire: The Indian Landscapes of William Hodges (London: Curzon, 2000); Romita Ray, Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013). On Calcutta, see Jeremiah P. Losty, Calcutta, City of Palaces: A Survey of the City in the Days of the East India Company, 1690–1858 (London: British Library, 1990). On the Taj Mahal, see Giles Tillotson, Taj Mahal (London: Profile Books, 2010). On Benares, see W. G. Archer, ‘Benares through the Eyes of British Artists’, Apollo 92 (1970), pp. 96–103. On architecture, see Mildred Archer, Indian Architecture and the British (London: Country Life, 1968), and Philip Davies, Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India, 1660–1947 (London: Penguin, 1987).
PORTRAITS AND PEOPLE
There are a number of useful introductions to the subject of portraiture in general. See, for example, Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, 1991); Joanna Woodall (ed.), Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). For the British context in particular, see Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), and Kate Retford, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). The most comprehensive study of portraiture by European artists in the days of the East India Company remains Mildred Archer’s India and British Portraiture, 1770–1825 (London: Sotheby’s, 1979). Beth Fowkes Tobin’s book, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (London: Duke University Press, 1999), is also valuable. See especially chapter 4, ‘Accommodating India: Domestic Arrangements in Anglo-Indian Family Portraiture’, pp. 110–38. Other helpful texts include Mildred Archer and Ronald Lightbown, India Observed: India as Viewed by British Artists, 1760–1860 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1982), and Natasha Eaton, ‘The Art of Colonial Despotism: Portraits, Politics and Power in South India, 1750–1795’, Cultural Critique 70 (2008), pp. 63–93. On Indian miniatures, see Toby Falk and Mildred Archer, Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1981).
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (www.oxforddnb.com) provides an unrivalled source for details on the lives of individual British artists and sitters. There are also a number of specialist studies dedicated to individual artists discussed in Picturing India. See, for example, Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill (eds), William Hodges, 1744–1797: The Art of Exploration (London: National Maritime Museum, 2004); Thomas Sutton, The Daniells: Artists and Travellers (London: Bodley Head, 1954); Mildred Archer, Early Views of India: The Picturesque Journeys of Thomas and William Daniell, 1786–1794 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980); Jagmohan Mahajan, Picturesque India: Sketches and Travels of Thomas and William Daniell (New Delhi: Lustre Press, 1983); An Illustrated Journey Round the World by Thomas, William & Samuel Daniell (London: Folio Society, 2007), introduced and edited by Katherine Prior; Mildred Archer, ‘Baltazard [sic] Solvyns and the Indian Picturesque’, Connoisseur 170 (1969), pp. 12–18; Mildred Archer and Toby Falk, The Passionate Quest: The Fraser Brothers in India (London: Scorpion, 1989). As noted above, the letters of Ozias Humphry in the Royal Academy were also useful.
For an interesting study of a single individual, and his multiple influences on the history of the East India Company, see Georgina Green, Sir Charles Raymond of Valentines and the East India Company (London: Hainault Press, 2015). And, on the issue of using individual biographies to make wider points about the history of the British Empire in India, see Margot Finn, ‘Anglo-Indian Lives in the Later Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2010), pp. 49–65.
The history of the nabobs is told in the work of a number of scholars. See, in particular, Percival Spear, The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth-Century India (London: Oxford University Press, 1932); Tillman W. Nechtman, ‘A Jewel in the Crown? Indian Wealth in Domestic Britain in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth Century Studies 41 (2007), pp. 71–86; Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Tillman W. Nechtman, ‘Mr Hickey’s Pictures: Britons and their Collectibles in Late Eighteenth-Century India’, in Barry Crosbie and Mark Hampton (eds), The Cultural Construction of the British World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 180–97. Readers might also consult Suresh Chandra Ghosh’s The British in Bengal: A Study of the British Society and Life in the Late Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2007), and Michael Edwardes, The Nabobs at Home (London: Constable, 1991).
PATRONAGE
For further details on the history of East India House, see William Foster, The East India House: Its History and Associations (London: John Lane, 1924); William Foster, John Company (London: Bodley Head, 1926); H. V. Bowen, ‘The Most Illustrious and Most Flourishing Commercial Organisation that Ever Existed: The East India Company’s Seaborne Empire, 1709–1833’, in H. V. Bowen, John McAleer and Robert J. Blyth, Monsoon Traders: The Maritime World of the East India Company (London: Scala, 2011), pp. 91–125, pp. 95–9. For the furnishings and internal decoration of East India House in the eighteenth century, see Mildred Archer, The India Office Collection of Paintings and Sculpture (London: British Library, 1986); John Hardy, India Office Furniture (London: British Library, 1982). For Government House in Calcutta, see Jeremiah P. Losty, Calcutta, City of Palaces: A Survey of the City in the Days of the East India Company, 1690–1858 (London: British Library, 1990), pp. 71–80.
On collecting, patronage and the arts more generally, see Mildred Archer, ‘British Patrons of Indian Artists’, Country Life 118 (18 August 1955), pp. 340–1; P. J. Marshall, ‘Warren Hastings as Scholar and Patron’, in Anne Whiteman, J. S. Bromley and P. G. M. Dickson (eds), Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 242–62; Mark Bence-Jones, ‘A Nabob’s Choice of Art: Clive of India as Builder and Collector’, Country Life 150 (25 November 1971), pp. 1446–8; Geoff Quilley, ‘Signs of Commerce: The East India Company and the Patronage of Eighteenth-Century British Art’, in H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby (eds), The Worlds of the East India Company (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), pp. 183–99; Joan Coutu, Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), chapter 9, ‘India: Empire Building as a Moral Imperative’, pp. 270–321; Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East, 1750–1850 (London: Fourth Estate, 2005). On the impact of the Company on domestic contexts in Britain, and the way in which Asian luxury goods came to shape the British country house, see the ‘East India Company at Home, 1757–1857’ project run by Margot Finn, Helen Clifford, Kate Smith and Ellen Filor (http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/eicah/home/).
For the paintings of George Lambert and Samuel Scott in the Directors’ Court Room, see Brian Allen, ‘The East India Company’s Settlement Pictures: George Lambert and Samuel Scott’, in Pauline Rohatgi and Pheroza Godrej (eds), Under the Indian Sun: British Landscape Artists (Bombay: Marg, 1995), pp. 1–16. For more on natural history drawings from India, see Mildred Archer, Natural History Drawings in the India Office Library (London: HMSO, 1962). For the definitive history of the East India Museum, see Ray Desmond, The India Museum, 1801–1879 (London: HMSO, 1982). The article by Robert Skelton is also valuable: ‘The Indian Collections: 1798 to 1978’, Burlington Magazine 120 (1978), pp. 297–304. For more on the representation of the Company, from the eighteenth century up to the present day, see John McAleer, ‘Displaying its Wares: Material Culture, the East India Company and British Encounters with India in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa, Daniel Roberts and Simon Davies (eds), Global Connections: India and Europe in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2014), pp. 199–221.