Imperial Intimacies: Portraiture and the East India Company, c.1757–1857, with Tate and the Courtauld

The history of the East India Company lies at the heart of more expansive stories about Britain and its place in the contemporary world: the history of imperialism, globalisation, liberal reform, and the making of the modern state. Yet, in many of these stories, the actual lives and experiences of individuals – both Indian and British – appear only faintly. This project will use the extraordinary array of portraits produced in connection with the East India Company between 1757 and 1857 to uncover new narratives about a wide array of individuals involved in, or impacted by, British imperialism in South Asia. In doing so, the project will recover the lives of forgotten – and often deliberately marginalised – people, attempting to reconstruct their personal beliefs, motivations, and experiences. By thinking through the portrait as a moment of encounter – one that often collided the power differentials of Briton and Indian, coloniser and colonised – the project has the potential to generate sophisticated new thinking about the phenomenology of portrait practice, as well as the capacity of scholars to recover and narrate these intimate imperial encounters. This project will enable a broader and urgent interrogation of the histories connecting artworks in Tate Britain's collections to the activities and legacies of the East India Company, many of which are yet to be identified. Portraiture holds a central place both in British artistic production and scholarship on British art - the walls of Tate Britain are testament to this lasting historical significance. This project is, therefore, an opportunity to resituate British portraiture of the eighteenth and nineteenth century within a transnational and trans-imperial context, examining the genre's expanded geographies, visual traditions, mediums, politics, and actors. The impact of the project is likely to be substantial, with direct relevance for historians of British art as well as a growing international network of scholars working on global art histories. More broadly, it has the potential to benefit other fields through its focus on questions of identity and representation, the geographies, politics, and actors involved in British imperialism, and through its interrogation of the imperial archive. Furthermore, within the museums and galleries sector, it will be of especial interest to institutions engaged in the difficult work of identifying and excavating the lives of marginalised sitters, and those engaged in researching and sharing the legacies of British imperialism in their own collections.