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Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
India's colonial past revealed through 200 masterful paintings
Founded in 1600 as a trading enterprise, the English East India company gradually transformed into a colonial power. By the late 18th Century, as it tightened its grip on India, company officials began commissioning Indian artists - many formerly employed by the Mughals - to create striking visual records of the land they were now ruling. A Treasury of Life: Indian Company Paintings, c. 1790 to 1835, an ongoing show in the Indian capital put together by Delhi Art Gallery (DAG), features over 200 works that once lay on the margins of mainstream art history. It is India's largest exhibition of company paintings, highlighting their rich diversity and the skill of Indian artists. Painted by largely unnamed artists, these paintings covered a wide range of subjects, but mainly fall into three categories: natural history, like botanical studies; architecture, including monuments and scenic views of towns and landscapes; and Indian manners and customs. "The focus on these three subject areas reflects European engagements with their Indian environment in an attempt to come to terms with all that was unfamiliar to Western eyes," says Giles Tillotson of DAG, who curated the show. "Europeans living in India were delighted to encounter flora and fauna that were new to them, and ancient buildings in exotic styles. They met – or at least observed – multitudes of people whose dress and habits were strange but – as they began to discern – were linked to stream of religious belief and social practice." Beyond natural history, India's architectural heritage captivated European visitors. Before photography, paintings were the best way to document travels, and iconic Mughal monuments became prime subjects. Patrons soon turned to skilled local artists. Beyond the Taj Mahal, popular subjects included Agra Fort, Jama Masjid, Buland Darwaza, Sheikh Salim Chishti's tomb at Fatehpur Sikri (above), and Delhi's Qutub Minar and Humayun's Tomb. The once-obscure and long-anonymous Indian artist Sita Ram, who painted the tomb, was one of them. From June 1814 to early October 1815, Sita Ram travelled extensively with Francis Rawdon, also known as the Marquess of Hastings, who had been appointed as the governor general in India in 1813 and held the position for a decade. (He is not to be confused with Warren Hastings, who served as India's first governor general much earlier.) The largest group in this collection is a set of botanical watercolours, likely from Murshidabad or Maidapur (in present-day West Bengal). While Murshidabad was the Nawab of Bengal's capital, the East India Company operated there. In the late 18th century, nearby Maidapur briefly served as a British base before Calcutta's (now Kolkata) rise eclipsed it. Originally part of the Louisa Parlby Album - named after the British woman who compiled it while her husband, Colonel James Parlby, served in Bengal - the works likely date to the late 18th Century, before Louisa's return to Britain in 1801. "The plants represented in the paintings are likely quite illustrative of what could be found growing in both the well-appointed gardens as well as the more marginal spaces of common greens, waysides and fields in the Murshidabad area during the late eighteenth century," writes Nicolas Roth of Harvard University. "These are familiar plants, domestic and domesticated, which helped constitute local life worlds and systems of meaning, even as European patrons may have seen them mainly as exotica to be collected." Another painting from the collection is of a temple procession showing a Shiva statue on an ornate platform carried by men, flanked by Brahmins and trumpeters. At the front, dancers with sticks perform under a temporary gateway, while holy water is poured on them from above. Labeled Ouricaty Tirounal, it depicts a ritual from Thirunallar temple in Karaikal in southern India, capturing a rare moment from a 200-year-old tradition. By the late 18th Century, company paintings had become true collaborations between European patrons and Indian artists. Art historian Mildred Archer called them a "fascinating record of Indian social life," blending the fine detail of Mughal miniatures with European realism and perspective. Regional styles added richness - Tanjore artists, for example, depicted people of various castes, shown with tools of their trade. These albums captured a range of professions - nautch girls, judges, sepoys, toddy tappers, and snake charmers. "They catered to British curiosity while satisfying European audience's fascination with the 'exoticism' of Indian life," says Kanupriya Sharma of DAG. Most studies of company painting focus on British patronage, but in south India, the French were commissioning Indian artists as early as 1727. A striking example is a set of 48 paintings from Pondicherry - uniform in size and style - showing the kind of work French collectors sought by 1800. One painting (above) shows 10 men in hats and loincloths rowing through surf. A French caption calls them nageurs (swimmers) and the boat a chilingue. Among the standout images are two vivid scenes by an artist known as B, depicting boatmen navigating the rough Coromandel coast in stitched-plank rowboats. With no safe harbours near Madras or Pondicherry, these skilled oarsmen were vital to European trade, ferrying goods and people through dangerous surf between anchored ships and the shore. Company paintings often featured natural history studies, portraying birds, animals, and plants - especially from private menageries. As seen in the DAG show, these subjects are typically shown life-size against plain white backgrounds, with minimal surroundings - just the occasional patch of grass. The focus remains firmly on the species itself. Ashish Anand, CEO of DAG says the the latest show proposes company paintings as the "starting point of Indian modernism". Anand says this "was the moment when Indian artists who had trained in courtly ateliers first moved outside the court (and the temple) to work for new patrons". "The agendas of those patrons were not tied up with courtly or religious concerns; they were founded on scientific enquiry and observation," he says. "Never mind that the patrons were foreigners. What should strike us now is how Indian artists responded to their demands, creating entirely new templates of Indian art."
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Business Standard
28-04-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
AGMs: Where are the shareholders despite a surge in investor base?
While the number of shareholders continues to rise, investor participation in annual general meetings has been steadily declining Premium Amit Tandon Listen to This Article Writing about the East India Company in the 1700s, Nick Robins in his book The Corporation That Changed the World wrote that 'the (East India) Company operated as a limited property-based democracy that was run for and by its shareholders……(The) Company's shareholders had to have £500 of nominal stock before they could vote either in the quarterly meetings of the Court of Proprietors held in March, June, September, and December, or at the annual meeting in April. This was the high point in the Company's calendar, when over a thousand shareholders would gather to elect a slate of 24 directors.'
The Guardian
21-04-2025
- The Guardian
Rex Cowan obituary
In 1967, Rex Cowan, who has died aged 97, visited the Isles of Scilly. There he saw divers exploring HMS Association, a warship that had sunk in 1707. He had already left his unsatisfying practice as a criminal law solicitor, and this experience set him on course to become a shipwreck explorer. Doing so would be a bold move, as he and his wife Zélide (nee Teague), whom he had married in 1960, had three daughters. But it was Zélide who challenged him to go through with the idea when, in an antiquarian bookshop, she chanced upon the story of Hollandia, a Dutch East Indiaman that had disappeared near Scilly in 1743 on its maiden voyage to Indonesia, carrying an enormous cargo of silver. While Zélide combed archives for clues about the lost ship, Cowan hired a team of divers and, not a diver himself, directed searches in the sea. He also struck a deal with the Dutch finance ministry to share the proceeds should he find the vessel. By 1971 he was almost broke, but using a proton magnetometer, a device that could detect hidden metals, enabled him to uncover the Hollandia. The resulting archaeological project lasted for more than a decade, at the start of which Cowan had to contend with rogue divers who were also looking for the ship's booty. Secrecy was vital. Silver coins brought up from the seabed – ultimately 60,000 – were hidden in bins in the Cowans' bedroom. His boat was set on fire and the brake cables of his car were cut. When news of Hollandia's discovery finally became public, he found himself at the centre of a media storm. Cowan was not motivated merely by money. To him a shipwreck was a time capsule trapped on the seabed, much as Pompeii had been trapped in ash. So he recruited reputable archaeologists, Peter Marsden and Howard Pell, to make exhaustive records of every object brought up from Hollandia – personal possessions and ship's fittings as well as coins. He loved the detective work that revealed human stories: a tale of disappointed love in a medallion, or a sealed jar of Dutch anchovies destined for homesick colonials across the world. Many of Cowan's coins were sold, prompting criticism from some archaeologists at this commodification of the past. But money was needed to finance expeditions. With each new discovery – the Prinses Maria in Scilly in 1973, the Svecia off Orkney in 1975, the Vliegend Hart near the Netherlands in 1981 – his reputation grew. His discoveries offered remarkable insights into the ships, crews and cargoes of the Dutch East India company, the greatest seaborne empire of its day. An exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, home to the paintings of the Dutch golden age in Amsterdam, was followed by a permanent gallery. In 1992 he was made a knight of the Orange order. In the UK, Cowan served on the Advisory Committee on Historic Wrecks for more than 20 years. But his relationship with British institutions was complicated. He struggled to find museum homes for his finds, and opposed Unesco's 2001 Convention on Underwater Cultural Heritage, which he believed marked the death knell for underwater archaeology. His colourful style went out of fashion, although he successfully sued one newspaper for calling him a 'treasure hunter'. Born in Golders Green, north London, Rex was the son of Fay (nee Rosenbloom) and Sam Cowan, who ran a toy import company. Their own parents were Jewish émigrés from Poland. His education at University College school was interrupted in 1940, when he and his sister, Anita, were evacuated to the US. Having crossed the Atlantic in a convoy, they lived in New York and then Hollywood with mother and daughter cousins – one a Broadway violinist, the other a writer of pulp fiction. Life was precarious, but those American years opened horizons. After service in the RAF, Cowan studied law at King's College London, and in 1957 won a Fulbright fellowship to study juvenile delinquency at the University of Southern California. A strong sense of social justice marked his legal career. As a solicitor he became known for offering pro bono advice to vulnerable people. In the 60s he co-founded the Brent (later London) Youth Advisory Centre, a drop-in clinic where young people could get free counselling and sexual health support, and he was a committed magistrate, and later chairperson, in a London juvenile court. He and Zélide even turned their home in Hampstead into a refuge for single pregnant women at a time when society's judgment was damning. He wrote several books. A Century of Images: Photographs by the Gibson Family (1997) provides a commentary on remarkable old photos of Scilly and Cornish wrecks. The Pirate King: The Strange Adventures of Henry Avery and the Birth of the Golden Age of Piracy (2024), written with Sean Kingsley, puts forward a theory about an audacious pirate who disappeared. He also produced TV documentaries. Chaos (1988), in Channel 4's Equinox series, explored how seemingly chaotic events in, for instance, the weather are governed by simple principles. For the BBC, The Young Ambassadors (1989) told the story of British schoolchildren evacuated across the Atlantic during the second world war, with narration by Cowan's fellow evacuee Claire Bloom. Zélide died in 2018. Cowan is survived by his long-term partner, the former Channel 4 and BBC radio executive Liz Forgan, his children, Alexandra, Juliet and Annie, and his sister. Rex Braham Cowan, shipwreck explorer, born 16 June 1927; died 9 March 2025
New York Times
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The ‘Monstrous Beauty' of Pretty Porcelains
The dragon lady, the courtesan, the submissive beauty — these enduring stereotypes of Asian and Southeast Asian femininity circulated in Europe and America centuries before the vast majority of Westerners had ever laid eyes on a real flesh-and-blood woman from those parts of the world. A major, and maybe surprising, source of these tropes? The Chinese porcelain dishes and figurines that first arrived in Europe by sea in the 16th century, brought by traders who originally used them as ballast for shipments of spices. People went mad for the translucent, lustrous, white material, so unlike the clunky stoneware they were accustomed to. They were equally fascinated by the cobalt-blue decorations that spoke of places, people, gods and other wonders they could only dream of. The wares kicked off a vogue for 'Chinoiserie' — a decorative style seen in furniture, textiles and fine art that swept Europe until the 19th century. An intriguing exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Monstrous Beauty,' brings together more than 200 objects from the 16th century to today, including works by seven contemporary Asian and Asian American women. It is billed as a 'feminist revision' of Chinoiserie, asking us to look at these porcelain objects not simply as pretty curiosities but as vehicles for long-held racial and cultural stereotypes about the East, especially when it came to Asian women. All those innocent-seeming pagodas, dragons, bamboo stalks and graceful women, the show argues, had an outsized influence on the West's image of Asia precisely because they had become so common that people hardly paid attention to them. The show opens, spectacularly, with five monumental 'translated vases' by the Korean sculptor and painter Yeesookyung. The artist glues together pieces of discarded porcelain and covers the cracks with gold leaf in the manner of Asian practices of repair in which breakage is honored as part of an object's history. But Yeesookyung's sculptures don't simply repair the broken vessels, much less honor them: She transforms them into bulbous, hybrid forms, half weird, half gorgeous and even sublime — monstrous beauties, indeed. An apt opening salvo for an exhibition that aims, as an opening statement suggests, 'to shatter the lure of the exotic.' The earliest objects brought to Europe were made for markets other than Europe, but as the Portuguese, the British and Dutch East India companies and other traders sensed that there was a profit to be made, they began commissioning Chinese manufacturers to cater to Western tastes in both the types of objects they made and their designs. The craze triggered a race to discover porcelain's closely guarded recipe. (The secret ingredient, the Europeans finally discovered in the mid-18th century, was kaolin, a white clay.) King Augustus II of Poland became so obsessed with discovering the formula that he was said to have succumbed to 'porcelain sickness.' He once gave the Prussian king a regiment of dragoons (elite soldiers) in exchange for a cache of 151 Chinese-made vessels, an example of which, a fine jar adorned with dragons and flowers, is on view. Capitalism was a dangerous business back then, as attested to by a strange relic in the first gallery, recovered from the shipwreck of an early-17th-century Dutch trading vessel. Over 350 years some of the lost cargo — a glowing white porcelain cup, peppercorns — became fused with shells and sand, like the bone of a sea monster. Mermaids and sirens — myths rooted in both erotic pleasure and the fear of death — show up frequently in early Chinoiserie, including a cup and saucer made around 1700 for the Dutch market showing a creature playing a violin to a besotted sailor with an emblazoned warning to 'beware the siren.' Cute. Less cute is an Italian-made sweetmeat dish — imagine taking a bonbon from one of the five scallop shells surrounding a screaming harpy, clawlike hands clutched at her sagging breasts. The Europeans who sought to replicate Chinese porcelain weren't driven by simple appreciation but by a desire to dominate. A tulip vase from around 1725 made by a Vienna workshop directed by Claudius Innocentius Du Paquier, the second European firm to discover the secret recipe, includes a vignette that shows the entrepreneur declaring 'No longer, China, shalt thou say thy arts are unknown/Behold thou shalt be conquered by the European spirit.' For all the testosterone-fueled competition, the style itself soon came to be associated with the feminine, in no small part thanks to collectors like Queen Mary II, who was by turns credited and blamed for turning women into voracious consumers of the wares. A section devoted to her includes the impressively sized vases and ewers she commissioned from Dutch artisans, as well as tapestries, furnishings and wallpapers made to set off her collections. In the later 17th century, porcelain became ubiquitous in the form of tea sets, made to enjoy another lucrative import from Asia, and the centerpiece of the feminized ritual of the tea party. There are lots of dragons, tigers and flowering bamboo, elegant Asian women and figures that might have walked straight out of a comic opera adorning the examples on display. But the charm and humor are accompanied at times by an easily overlooked, casual racism: A teapot made by the Meissen porcelain manufactory, the oldest in Europe, shows grinning, caricatural figures in a tropical landscape — two Chinese, one European, and another black-skinned with a feathered headdress. An accompanying tea caddy depicts a subservient Asian woman washing the feet of a European man. Figurines were an important vehicle for transmitting ideas about Asian women. European manufacturers portrayed them as actresses, musicians, goddesses, mothers and representatives of Asia in depictions of the 'four continents' (Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas), a popular theme in countries that were intent on colonizing the whole world. These images did not simply 'other' Asian women — they also offered European women alternative ways to see themselves, outside the restrictions and expectations placed on them by their own cultures. This was the case when it came to reverse painted mirrors — in the early 18th century, European merchants shipped mercury glass to Canton (now Guangzhou), where they were decorated with images of beautiful Chinese women; as time went on, people would commission portraits of English women in the same manner. All of these motifs — not only humans, but mermaids and monsters, dragons and manticores, exotic beings all — were projected onto the real-life Asian women who began immigrating to Europe and America in the 19th century. More recently, the cyborg has been added to the list. An illuminating moment in the last section of the show pairs shoes made for bound feet with Lee Bul's 'Untitled (Cyborg Leg)' from 2000, a porcelain sculpture that looks back to that centuries-old Chinese cultural practice and forward to our robot future. This section also features the American-born Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood. Her career was shaped by stereotypes. The Hays Code prevented her from kissing a white actor onscreen, so she couldn't be a leading lady — instead, she was often cast as the 'Dragon Lady,' a racialized femme fatale. Among the works on view are her black, form-fitting evening dress from 1934, emblazoned with a gold-sequined dragon running from shoulder to hem, and an evening coat she had made in England, modeled after male warrior costumes from Chinese opera. In a life bound by limiting images of Asians, she found ways to assert her power. The exhibition is far from perfect — the curator, Iris Moon, has brought a lot of ideas and objects into the space, and takes every opportunity to interpret them, which overcomplicates an otherwise refreshing take on the decorative arts. The exhibition is also so intent on avoiding the standard line on Chinoiserie, which focuses on the race to understand the technology of porcelain, that it fails to explain that technology at all. But the closing work in the show, 'Abyssal' by Patty Chang, a full-size massage table made of unglazed porcelain, reminds us of the urgency of the questions the show raises. The sculpture recalls the murder of six Atlanta spa workers in 2021, a crime that tragically revealed the long history of aligning Asian women with sexual availability and violent death. When 'Monstrous Beauty' closes, the piece will be sunk into the Pacific Ocean, where it will be overtaken, perhaps, by coral and sediment, becoming a distant relative of that fragment recovered from the 1613 shipwreck that brought porcelain to the West. Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie Through Aug. 17, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue; 212-525-7710,
