Artists and the East India Company

Catalog description

This collaborative seminar examines artists’ innovations amidst the commercial ambitions of the East India Company at major ports and centers of trade across Asia. Within the period of the Company’s relentless pursuit of profits, artists trained in India, China, and Britain forged relationships across cultures and experimented with materials and techniques to produce striking artworks. This course interrogates the relationship between these artists and a corporation. It asks whether “style” links such disparate arts through subjects of colonial interest—including portraits and ethnographic types, landscapes and architectural drawings, plants and animals—or if the description holds only through the terminology of “Company” art that developed as the British empire waned. Students will engage with these arts in Brown’s collections, and in the exhibition, Painters, Ports & Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1760-1830, at the Yale Center for British Art.