The Art of a Corporation

The Art of a Corporation
Author: Jennifer Howes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2023-04-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000869490

The Art of a Corporation is a comprehensive study of artworks that were commissioned and collected by the East India Company from the early seventeenth to the midnineteenth centuries. These items range from oil paintings on canvas and marble statuary, to sandstone Buddhas and metal figurines of Hindu deities. The book takes a chronological approach and focuses on provenance to show that objects are valuable primary resources for understanding the East India Company’s history. The artworks illustrate how one of the longest-surviving multinational corporations in the Western world changed over its three-century history and provide a powerful visual account of its perpetually reinvented image. This book is a must read for scholars and researchers of art history, colonial art, colonial studies, British history, economic history, business history, South Asian history, post-colonial studies, and cultural studies. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

Indian Renaissance

Indian Renaissance
Author: Hermionede Almeida
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351562967

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India is the first comprehensive examination of British artists whose first-hand impressions and prospects of the Indian subcontinent became a stimulus for the Romantic Movement in England; it is also a survey of the transformation of the images brought home by these artists into the cultural imperatives of imperial, Victorian Britain. The book proposes a second - Indian - Renaissance for British (and European) art and culture and an undeniable connection between English Romanticism and British Imperialism. Artists treated in-depth include James Forbes, James Wales, Tilly Kettle, William Hodges, Johann Zoffany, Francesco Renaldi, Thomas and William Daniell, Robert Home, Thomas Hickey, Arthur William Devis, R. H. Colebrooke, Alexander Allan, Henry Salt, James Baillie Fraser, Charles Gold, James Moffat, Charles D'Oyly, William Blake, J. M. W. Turner and George Chinnery.

The Artificial Empire

The Artificial Empire
Author: Giles Henry Rupert Tillotson
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2000
Genre: Cities and towns
ISBN: 0700712828

This book discusses the role of the visual arts in the assertion of European colonial power, examining the representation of Indian scenery and architecture by British artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Picturing India

Picturing India
Author: John McAleer
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2017-10-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295744502

The British engagement with India was an intensely visual one. Images of the subcontinent, produced by artists and travelers in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century heyday of the East India Company, reflect the increasingly important role played by the Company in Indian life. And they mirror significant shifts in British policy and attitudes toward India. The Company’s story is one of wealth, power, and the pursuit of profit. It changed what people in Europe ate, what they drank, and how they dressed. Ultimately, it laid the foundations of the British Raj. Few historians have considered the visual sources that survive and what they tell us about the link 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 Company and its complex relationship with India, its people and cultures.

The Whole Picture

The Whole Picture
Author: Alice Procter
Publisher: Cassell
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-03-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1788402219

"Probing, jargon-free and written with the pace of a detective story... [Procter] dissects western museum culture with such forensic fury that it might be difficult for the reader ever to view those institutions in the same way again. " Financial Times 'A smart, accessible and brilliantly structured work that encourages readers to go beyond the grand architecture of cultural institutions and see the problematic colonial histories behind them.' - Sumaya Kassim Should museums be made to give back their marbles? Is it even possible to 'decolonize' our galleries? Must Rhodes fall? How to deal with the colonial history of art in museums and monuments in the public realm is a thorny issue that we are only just beginning to address. Alice Procter, creator of the Uncomfortable Art Tours, provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art history and tells the stories that have been left out of the canon. The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space: The Palace, The Classroom, The Memorial and The Playground. Each section tackles the fascinating, enlightening and often shocking stories of a selection of art pieces, including the propaganda painting the East India Company used to justify its rule in India; the tattooed Maori skulls collected as 'art objects' by Europeans; and works by contemporary artists who are taking on colonial history in their work and activism today. The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.

Lives of Indian Images

Lives of Indian Images
Author: Richard H. Davis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2020-07-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1400844428

For many centuries, Hindus have taken it for granted that the religious images they place in temples and home shrines for purposes of worship are alive. Hindu priests bring them to life through a complex ritual "establishment" that invokes the god or goddess into material support. Priests and devotees then maintain the enlivened image as a divine person through ongoing liturgical activity: they must awaken it in the morning, bathe it, dress it, feed it, entertain it, praise it, and eventually put it to bed at night. In this linked series of case studies of Hindu religious objects, Richard Davis argues that in some sense these believers are correct: through ongoing interactions with humans, religious objects are brought to life. Davis draws largely on reader-response literary theory and anthropological approaches to the study of objects in society in order to trace the biographies of Indian religious images over many centuries. He shows that Hindu priests and worshipers are not the only ones to enliven images. Bringing with them differing religious assumptions, political agendas, and economic motivations, others may animate the very same objects as icons of sovereignty, as polytheistic "idols," as "devils," as potentially lucrative commodities, as objects of sculptural art, or as symbols for a whole range of new meanings never foreseen by the images' makers or original worshipers.

British Art and the East India Company

British Art and the East India Company
Author: Geoff Quilley
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2020
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1783275103

Examines the role of the East India Company in the production and development of British art, demonstrating how art and related forms of culture were closely tied to commerce and the rise of the commercial state. This book examines the role of the East India Company in the production and development of British art during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a new "school" of British art was in its formative stages with the foundation of exhibiting societies and the Royal Academy in 1768. It focuses on the Company's patronage, promotion and uses of art, both in Britain and in India and the Far East, and how the Company and its trade with the East were represented visually, through maritime imagery, landscape, genre painting and print-making. It also considers how, for artists such as William Hodges and Arthur William Devis, the East India Company, and its provision of a wealthy market in British India, provided opportunities for career advancement, through alignment with Company commercial principles. In this light, the book's main concern is to address the conflicted and ambiguous nature of art produced in the service of a corporation that was the "scandal of empire" for most of its existence, and how this has shaped and distorted our understanding of the history of British art in relation to the concomitant rise of Britain as a self-consciously commercial and maritime nation, whose prosperity relied upon global expansion, increasing colonialism and the development of mercantile organisations.

British and Irish Paintings in Public Collections

British and Irish Paintings in Public Collections
Author: Christopher Wright
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 950
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300117301

This book sets a new standard as a work of reference. It covers British and Irish art in public collections from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, and it encompasses nearly 9,000 painters and 90,000 paintings in more than 1,700 separate collections. The book includes as well pictures that are now lost, some as a consequence of the Second World War and others because of de-accessioning, mostly from 1950 to about 1975 when Victorian art was out of fashion. By listing many tens of thousands of previously unpublished works, including around 13,000 which do not yet have any form of attribution, this book becomes a unique and indispensable work of reference, one that will transform the study of British and Irish painting.