• Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Art, Ambition and Empire: How Britain's Artists Painted India, 1770-1800

Art, Ambition and Empire: How Britain's Artists Painted India, 1770-1800

Hardcover

Art HistoryGeneral World HistoryBritish History

PREORDER - Expected ship date January 15, 2027

ISBN10: 180526527X
ISBN13: 9781805265276
Publisher: Hurst & Co.
Published: Jan 15 2027
Pages: 448
Language: English
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?

Also in

Art History