Painters, Ports and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1760–1830

In January 2026, the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) will open Painters, Ports and Profits: Artists and the East India Company. This exhibition explores the interactions between artists trained in India, China and Britain amid the relentless commercial ambitions of the East India Company at key ports and centres of trade in Asia. Featuring over a hundred objects drawn from the YCBA collection in various media – including architectural drafts, opaque watercolours, hand-coloured aquatints and small- and large-scale portraits – the exhibition highlights works by artists who are no longer well known alongside those of well-established ones. Brought together for the first time, these works tell a story of artists compelled by new subjects, styles and materials in expanding markets, profoundly affecting art within and beyond Asia.

As the power of the British empire waned in the twentieth century, “Company painting” became a prevalent umbrella term to describe works made for Company officials, specifically by Indian artists, and “Export art” became a descriptor for works created by Chinese artists for a European market. Painters, Ports and Profits challenges and critically rethinks these terms while also putting the arts into dialogue. It presents an expanded conception of arts made under the auspices of the Company by focusing on artists trained in different ways who worked for Company patrons as well as commercial markets in India, China and Britain; the types of subjects in which they specialised; and the artistic materials with which they experimented. By examining the range of arts and relationships developed during the Company’s relentless pursuit of profits, the exhibition sheds light on aesthetic and colonial discourses that were formed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and persist today.

Co-curators Laurel Peterson and Holly Shaffer will preview the themes and objects explored in the exhibition and the related catalogue.

Speaker bios: Laurel O. Peterson is the Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art. She specialises in British works on paper produced during the long eighteenth century. She served as the organising curator of John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal in 2019 and as co-curator of Architecture, Theater, and Fantasy: Bibiena Drawings from the Jules Fisher Collection in 2021, both at the Morgan Library and Museum. She received her PhD in the history of art from Yale and her research has been supported by the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Lewis Walpole Library. She has held positions at the British Museum and the Morgan Library.

Holly Shaffer is Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities in the department of history of art and architecture at Brown University. Her research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arts in Britain and South Asia, and their intersections. Her first book, Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910 (London and New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre with Yale University Press, 2022), was awarded the Edward C. Dimock Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities and an Historians of British Art Book Award. In 2011, she curated Adapting the Eye: An Archive of the British in India, 1770–1830 at the YCBA, and in 2013, Strange and Wondrous: Prints of India from the Robert J. Del Bontà Collection at the National Museum of Asian Art. She has published essays in Archives of Asian Art, The Art Bulletin, Art History, Journal 18, Modern Philology and Third Text, and recently edited volume 51 of Ars Orientalis on the movement of graphic arts across Asia and Europe.

Image credit: Unknown artist (Company style), Breadnut (Artocarpus camansi), ca. 1825. Watercolor, gouache, and graphite. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, B2022.5.

Information about event format and access

The event starts with a presentation lasting around 40mins, followed by Q&A and a free drinks reception. The event is hosted in our Lecture Room, which is up two flights of stairs (there is no lift). The talk will also be streamed online and recording published on our website.

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