Nostalgia for the exotic: Creating an imperial art in London, 1750-1793

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 39, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 227-250

  Eaton, Natasha ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67649963335     PISSN: 00132586     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2005.0060     Document Type: Review

References (92)

1. For nostalgia see Jean Starobinski, "The Idea of Nostalgia," Diogenes 54 (Summer 1966): 81-103.
2. For a more contemporary perspective, see Andrei A. Vznesenskii, Nostalgia for the Present, ed. Vera Dunham and Max Hayward, tr. Robert Bly, et al. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980);
3. Simone Signoret, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978).
4. For the relationship between nostalgia and modern philosophy, see Vladimir Jankélévitch, L'Irreversibilité et la nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1974).
5. C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).
6. A. O. Lovejoy and Georges Bois, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997), 287-367.
7. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1993).
8. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor: Prom Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1992), xvii-xviii;
9. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), 143.
10. Friedrich von Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, tr. J. A. Elias (New York, Ungar, 1966), 83.
11. Maxine Berg, "In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present 182 (2004): 85-182.
12. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978);
13. see Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau, eds., Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1988),
14. C. Knellwolf, "The Exotic Frontier of the Imperial Imagination," Eighteenth-Century Life 26.3 (2002): 13-34,
15. which is included in a special issue devoted to the Exotic and F. Affergen, Exotisme et altérité (Paris: PUF, 1987), 22-45.
16. Hosea Morse, Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635-1834 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), vols. 1-3.
17. John Irwin and K. B. Brett, Origins of Chintz (London: H.M.S.O, 1970).
18. Frank Perlin, "The Other Species World: Speciation of Commodities and Moneys and the Knowledge-Base of Commerce, 1500-1900," in S. Chaudhury and M. Morineau, eds., Merchants, Companies and Trade: Europe and Asia in the "Early Modern Era (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 145-74.
19. Adam Anderson, An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time: Containing an History of the Great Commercial Interests of the British Empire, 2 vols. (London: John Stockdale,1764), 1.1.
20. One of the few studies on British taste that acknowledges the importance of the exotic is B. S. Allen, Tides of English Taste, 1619-1800: A Background for the Study of Literature, 2 vols. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1969).
21. Percival Spear, The Nabob: A Study of Social Life in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932).
22. Banks, cited in Richard Davis, Lives of Indian Images (New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), 159. "Nabob" is the term that Britons used to describe those East India Company officials who made fortunes in India and who supposedly acquired the wealth and habits of nawabs (Indian princes).
23. See also Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet, "Ingenuity, Preference and the Pricing of Pictures: The Smith-Reynolds Connection," in N. De Marchi and C. Goodwin, eds., Economic Engagements with Art (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999).
24. David Porter, "Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste," Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.3 (2002): 395-411.
25. Lorraine Daston, "The Factual Sensibility," Isis 79 (1988): 452-70.
26. Peter Pels, "The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact and Fancy," in P. Spyer, ed., Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (New York: Routledge, 1998), 91-121.
27. Jonathan Lamb, "Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales," Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 133-66.
28. Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (London: Routledge, 2002), xxvii.
29. Although the thesis of Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, eds. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Penguin, 1892) in favor of an eighteenth-century English consumer revolution has been challenged; I make reference briefly here, specifically with colonial taste in mind.
30. James Bunn, "The Aesthetics of British Mercantilism," New Literary History 11 (1980): 303-21.
31. Neil De Marchi, "Adam Smith's Accommodation of "Altogether Endless Desires," in Maxime Berg and Helen Clifford, eds. Consumers and Luxury Consumer Cultures in Europe 1650-1850 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1999).
32. Wolfram Schmidgen, "Robinson Crusoe, Enumeration and the Mercantile Fetish," Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.1 (2001): 19-39.
33. M. Archer, India and British Portraiture, 1770-1825 (London: Sotheby Parke Barnet, 1979).
34. N. K. Sinha, ed. The History of Bengal 1757-1905 (Calcutta: Calcutta Univ. Press, 1967).
35. C. H. Philips, The East India Company 1784-1834 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1940);
36. Holden Furber, John Company at Work (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948);
37. Huw Bowen, Revenue and Reform (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993),
38. Amales Tripathi, Trade and Finance in Bengal Presidency 1793-1833 (Calcutta: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), 1-35.
39. J. Z. Holzman, The Nabob in England: A Study of the Returning Anglo-Indian, 1760-1785 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1926);
40. P. J. Marshall, East India Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976).
41. N. K. Sinha, The Economic History of Bengal: From Plassey to Permanent Settlement, (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1965), 1.1-34, 75-128, 157-220.
42. P. J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead, Eastern India 1740-1828; The Cambridge History of India II.2, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 70-136.
43. Earl of Shaftesbury, "Advice to an Author," Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times etc., ed. John Robertson, 2 vols. (Indiannopolis, Bobbs Merrill,1964), 1.219.
44. H. Walpole, Correspondence, ed. Wilmarth Lewis (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), 38 volumes 28.101, 35.301.
45. W. Hauptman, "Beckford, Brandouin and the Rajah," Apollo 143 (May, 1996): 30-9
46. and L.Harris, "Archibald Swinton: A New Source for Albums of Indian Miniatures in the Beckford Collection," Burlington Magazine 143 (June 2001): 360-6.
47. Beckford acquired images from Captain Archibald Swinton and from the Swiss Orientalist Colonel Antoine Polier, to be discussed below. Reynolds owned an album of Mughal miniatures including work by famed artists Chitarman, Mir Hashim and Muhammad Nadir 1661-62 (BL: Add Or.18801) which he acquired in London in July, 1777;
48. V. A. Smith, A History of the Fine Arts of India and Ceylon, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918), 458, 482.
49. M. C. Beach and E. Koch, King of the World: The Padshahnama (Windsor: Windsor Castle Publications, 1997).
50. Terence McInerney, "Mughal Painting During the Reign of Muhammad Shah," Barbara Schmitz, ed. After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Bombay: Marg, 2003), 12-34.
51. For Nidha Mal's work see J. Rosenfeld and M. C. Beach, The Arts of India and Nepal; The Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), n. 22,
52. and Linda Leach, Mughal and Other Indian Paintings from the Chester Beatty Librarys, 3 vols. (Dublin: Chester Beatty), 2, no. 6.322.
53. M. Archer and T. Falk, Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library (London: Sotheby Parke Barnet, 1981) introduction, observe that the enormous collection of Company servant Richard Johnson was made up of individual images - he had not been able to purchase a 'muraqqa whole (12).
54. A. J. Toppin, "The China Trade and Some London Chinamen," Transactions of the English Ceramic Circle 3 (1934): 10-22.
55. Roxanne Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
56. For an instance of a sale when colonial pictures were dubbed Indian, see Sir Archibald Campbell's estate (CSC April, 27, 1792).
57. S. P. Verma, Mughal Painters (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994).
58. Mr. Simpson, Catalogue of Indian Idols, Indian Paintings, Drawings etc., to be Sold at Christie's Great Room, Pall Mall, May 6, 1792, consisting of 85 lots - not paginated.
59. Diana Eck, Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996).
60. Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 25-56.
61. Banks and Heals archive, Print Room, British Museum and J. Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
62. Samuel Foote, The Nabob: A Comedy in Three Acts (London,1772);
63. P. J. Marshall, Problems of Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).
64. See Robert Travers, Contested Notions of Sovereignty in Bengal under the British, 1765-1785, (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 2001), 34.
65. Natasha Eaton, "William Hodges' Visual Genealogy for Colonial India," in Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill, eds. William Hodges, 1744-1797: The Art of Exploration (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 2004), 35-42.
66. A recent text that disputes the decline of Mughal art after Akbar and his grandsons is Schmitz, After the Great Mughals.
67. See P.J. Marshall, Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke: Volumes 7-8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991 and 2000).
68. Vishakha N.Desai, "Reflections of the Past in the Present: Copying Processes in Indian Painting," Thomas Metcalf and Catherine Asher, eds. Perceptions of South Asia's Visual Past, (Delhi: Oxford & IBH Publishing co. Pvt. Ltd., 1994), 135-47.
69. R. del Bontà, "Late or Faux Mughal Painting: A Question of Intent," in Schimtz, After the Great Mughals, 150-65.
70. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Colonial Conquest, (New York: Routledge, 1995).
71. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1986), 193.
72. Timothy Touchstone, Tea and Sugar of the Nabob and the Creole: A Poem in Two Cantos (London, 1792), 9-10.
73. The records and minutes of the premiums offered by the Society of Arts demonstrate its attempts both to discover alternative sources to, and to domesticate the processes of manufacture associated with those products under the Company's monopolies; PR/G6/112 series, Royal Society of Arts, London.
74. See Maya Jasanoff, "Collectors of Empire: Objects, Conquests and Imperial Self Fashioning," Past and Present 184.1 (August 2004): 109-35.
75. Dispatches to Bengal E/4/647, May 5, 1798, India Office and Oriental Collections, London;
76. Astatic Annual Researches (London, 1799), 5 vols. 1.107-108. The enormous holdings of the East India Repository were based on two enormous eighteenth-century art collections - the spoils from the defeat of the south Indian kingdom of Mysore in 1799 and the private collection of Richard Johnson which he sold to the Directors in 1807.
77. Davis, Lives of Indian images, 45/61, details the donation of objects from the Fourth Mysore War belonging to Tipu Sultan, to the East India Company.
78. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1992), chapters 2-3.
79. Morning Herald August 6, 1784, Whitley Papers, British Museum.
80. V. Manners and G.Williamson, Johann Zoffany RA: His Life and Works (London, 1981), 287-94.
81. Polier was one of the most prolific collectors of his age. Even in India, he sold 215 manuscripts to Edward Pote, Orientalist of King's College, Cambridge who donated some of these to Eton (Hauptman 34).
82. Mir Chand adapted at least 68 copies of European paintings (including a Titian Venus) for Polier - as seen in his correspondence in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Supp. Persian 479, ff.256-257). Bengal Inventories: L/AG/34/27/24 (OIOC) 1800 (estate of Colonel Claude Martin) included eight Indian copies after Zoffany pictures. His agenda is mixed: for example he did not own Zoffa-ny's Mr and Mrs Hastings so may have wanted a "substitute" but he did own several of the other pictures of which he wanted copies.
83. Morning Post, May 1, 1775, 1 (my emphasis).
84. See for instance, Rembrandt's Jahangir Receiving an Address (c.1606-28; miniature and his adaptation c.1655 British Museum; pen and ink.) one of at least 23 drawings after Indian paintings from 1650-1656.
85. Reynolds was commissioned by the Court of Directors to portray Stringer Lawrence; he also took the likenesses of Hastings, the Clive family, Henry Vansittart, Hector Munro, J.Z.Holwell and Richard Barwell. For a colonial picture sent from Hastings in Calcutta as a gift to George III altered by Reynolds see Hastings Papers BL: Add Ms 29, 192, f.93.
86. For the RA as patron of imperial monuments see Holger Hoock, The King's Artists (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003).
87. John Barrell, "Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Englishness of English Art,"in Homi Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 154-76.
88. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses, ed. R.Wark, (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,1981), Discourse XVII, 136.
89. From 1775, Reynolds's Discourses incorporate references to the East and from 1783, those artists who traveled to India were almost exclusively educated at the Academy's Schools. Painters (for instance John Flaxman) who never traveled to India began to experiment with Indian subjects from Mughal miniatures.
90. According to CSC, from the late 1770s, Indian pictures begin to disappear from the prime spaces of elite homes by 1785. In the mid 1780s Indian images are itemized as being on staircases or in butlers' garrets or else as part of specialized "oriental museums" such as that of the Honorable Richard Bateman (CSC May 3, 1774) and Captain Carr (CSC February 9, 1780).
91. M. Archer, Company Drawings in the India Office Library (London: British Library publications, 1972), introduction.
92. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998), 111.