Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850

This art book is a scholarly exhibition catalog that explores the complex artistic exchanges shaped by the global reach of the East India Company. Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art, the volume examines how British, Indian, and Chinese artists responded to new materials, markets, and visual demands created by imperial trade.

Rather than treating artistic traditions in isolation, the catalog foregrounds cross-cultural interaction and experimentation. Essays consider the circulation of pigments, papers, and techniques, as well as the emergence of new subjects tied to ports, commerce, architecture, and colonial administration. Many of the artists discussed, long overlooked in traditional art histories, played a crucial role in shaping visual and material culture within and beyond Asia.

Edited by Laurel O. Peterson and Holly Shaffer, the book features more than one hundred works drawn primarily from the Yale Center for British Art’s collection. These include architectural drawings, burnished opaque watercolors, hand-colored aquatints, intimate portraits, and large-scale works, among them a monumental scroll depicting the city of Lucknow.

Distributed by Yale University Press, this hardcover catalog functions as both an exhibition record and an independent reference work. It is an essential resource for readers interested in British art, global eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual culture, colonial histories, and the entanglement of art and commerce.