The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857
Author: Margot Finn
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 540
Release: 2018-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1787350274
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The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain. The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.

Important European Sculpture

Important European Sculpture
Author: Charles Avery
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2017-03-19
Genre:
ISBN: 9781911300151
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*This richly illustrated and scholarly catalogue accompanies an exhibition at Carlton Hobbs in New York, January 2017. Among the 25 beautiful works, dating from the early Renaissance to the Neoclassical period, are important statuettes by masters such as Gianfrancesco Susini, Willem Danielsz van Tetrode, Masimiliano Soldani-Benzi, Pietro Tacca and Joseph Nollekens.This elegant catalog accompanies the latest in a series of acclaimed exhibitions by Tomasso Brothers Fine Art at Carlton Hobbs LLC in New York (19-27 January 2017). It includes works by some of the greatest European sculptors from the Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical periods - a serene polychromed stucco Madonna and Child by the workshop of Lorenzo Ghiberti (c.1378-1455) from c.1423-40, along with two polychrome glazed terracottas by Santi (1494-1576) and Benedetto Buglioni (1459-1521). There are also a number of newly discovered masterpieces in bronze, for which Tomasso Brothers are now synonymous, which include a magnificent, striding, early bronze after the antique by Willem Danielsz van Tetrode (c.1525-1580). Intriguingly, the Castiglioni Hercules and Antaeus by Pietro Tacca is conjectured to have been made to celebrate a marriage between the great houses of Medici and Della Rovere, c.1620-37. The exhibition also includes a unique 'dancing' version of the ancient Borghese Satyr by Gian Francesco Susini, a highly finished composition of Ganymede and the Eagle by Massimiliano Soldani- Benzi (1656-1740) and an extremely rare gilt-bronze relief by the enigmatic court sculptor to Charles I of England, Francesco Fanelli (1577-c.1661). Amongst the finest and most exquisite objects on show are the newly discovered terracotta roundels by John Bacon the Elder (1740-1799) after frescoes found at Pompeii, that were later translated into black basalt and white stoneware versions by Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795). Other treasures in terracotta include two works by Joseph Nollekens (1732-1823) depicting Eve bewailing the death of Abel and Lot and his Daughters, both believed to have been bought by J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) in Nollekens' posthumous sale of 1823. The carefully researched entries accompany beautiful photography and are bolstered by significant contributions from Charles Avery, Giancarlo Gentilini, Stefano Grandesso and Lorenzo Principi.