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.

Following the lives of four artists, a beautifully illustrated account of Britain's artistic interactions with India at the dawn of the Raj.

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?

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