Meet The Drawing Foundation in New Haven for an intimate discussion and curator-led tour of Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850 at the Yale Center for British Art.

This exhibition tells the story of artists from India, Britain, and China who worked in the era of one of the most powerful corporations in history. The British East India Company began in 1600 as a private trading enterprise but grew into a military and political force during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It waged war to rule India and sell opium in China. To support its commercial and imperial goals, the Company encouraged its agents to commission art. Works of art depicted commodities, functioned as gifts to ease trade deals and build alliances, and visually recorded the places and societies where the Company traded and governed.

This exhibition, of more than one hundred objects, is mostly drawn from the YCBA’s rich collection of works on paper from Asia. It includes rich opaque watercolors, large-scale oil portraits, evocative architectural drafts and a spectacular thirty-seven-foot-long scroll. The artists featured here trained in Indian courts, in art and military institutes in Britain, and in Chinese workshops. In preparing for the exhibition, curators, conservators, and conservation scientists explored how these artists combined regional methods with new materials and techniques to create artworks of great beauty and innovation.

Laurel O. Peterson is Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art.

Holly Shaffer is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University.

This event is organized by The Drawing Foundation in partnership with the Yale Center for British Art

Image: Artist now unknown, Breadnut (Artocarpus camansi) (detail), ca. 1825. Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on laid paper. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, B2022.5.