Chapter 1 - Introduction: Corporate Patronage and Company Artists

Summary

One of the most reproduced British art works of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries made in connection with the East India Company, at the height of its commercial and military power across Britain and Asia, is Spiridione Roma's allegory Britannia receiving the Riches of the East, painted for East India House in Leadenhall Street in the City of London in 1778 (Fig. 1.1). The painting, originally made for the Revenue Committee Room of East India House, is a frequent recourse for historians of the Company to illustrate it as a modernizing corporation, aware of the need for an image of itself to be projected into the public and commercial spheres of late eighteenth-century London; and also as a visual summation of the place of the Company trade within an increasingly global political economy. It is an overworked and, in this context, an over-exposed image. From the perspective of traditional art history, based on values of connoisseurship, quality and canonical status, the recurrent turn to Roma's painting is curious: it is by a virtually unknown artist, and is clumsily executed. Yet, from a purely historical perspective, within the context of the history of empire, trade and the East India Company, it is an extraordinarily rich and salient image. It thus points to an issue that is at the heart of what I want to explore in this book: how to bridge the gulf that has traditionally persisted between the discipline of art history and those of imperial, economic and maritime history. Despite an overriding concern with commercialization and consumption, particularly in eighteenth-century British art and cultural studies over the last four decades, this has never properly been directed at considering the interconnections between the world of art and the world of commerce as represented by the leading mercantile trading organization of the early modern era: the East India Company. Although British art's concern with India has been the focus of extensive scholarly interest, going back to the pioneering work of Sir William Foster and, particularly, Mildred Archer, whose documentation of British artists working in India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries laid the foundation for everything that has followed in the field, this has been under the broader purview of British- Indian cultural relations generally, rather than scrutinizing the Company specifically.