Painters, Ports, and Profits

Draws on the Yale Center for British Art's rich collection to critically reconsider the vibrant creative exchanges between artists in India, China, and Britain during a period ruthlessly driven by commerce

Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850 surveys the remarkable artistic innovations that emerged within the context of the British East India Company's commercial and militaristic expansion into India and China. Extending the term "Company Style" to encompass the broad range of work created within the imperial corporation's cross-cultural networks, this comprehensive exhibition catalogue celebrates the British, Indian, and Chinese artists—often unknown—whose experimentation with papers, pigments, and other materials produced astonishing aesthetic diversity. Compelled by new subjects and techniques, so-called Company artists profoundly affected visual culture within and beyond Asia, challenging notions of asymmetric power dynamics at the apex of the East India Company's rapacious pursuit of profits. Edited by curators Laurel O. Peterson and Holly Shaffer, Painters, Ports, and Profits features more than one hundred objects—architectural drafts, burnished opaque watercolors, hand-colored aquatints, and small- and large-scale portraits—drawn from the Yale Center for British Art's rich collection and includes new research from an international group of scholars, curators, and conservators.

Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art

Exhibition Schedule:

Yale Center for British Art

(January 8–May 31, 2026)