Holly Shaffer – författare

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 tells the story of the remarkable creative exchanges that coincided with the rise of one of the most ruthless and powerful corporations in history. Scholarship on this period often separates Indian, Chinese, and British artists; Painters, Ports, and Profits instead foregrounds the vital interactions between their practices. Artistic experimentation with papers, pigments, and other materials produced works of astonishing beauty and variety. Compelled by new subjects and techniques, these artists, many now unknown, had a profound effect on visual and material culture within and beyond Asia.Edited by curators Laurel O. Peterson and Holly Shaffer, Painters, Ports, and Profits features more than one hundred objects drawn primarily from the Yale Center for British Art’s collection, including architectural drafts, burnished opaque watercolors, hand-colored aquatints, small and large-scale portraits, and a spectacular thirty-seven-foot-long scroll depicting the city of Lucknow. An international group of scholars, curators, and conservators provide rich commentary based on new research. Published by the Yale Center for British Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule:Yale Center for British Art(January 8–May 31, 2026)

Conceptualizes “graft”— the violent and creative processes of suturing arts as a method of empire building in western eighteenth-century IndiaGrafted Arts focuses on Maratha military rulers and British East India Company officials who used the arts to engage in diplomacy, wage war, compete for prestige, and generate devotion as they allied with (or fought against) each other to control western India in the eighteenth century. This book conceptualizes the artistic combinations that resulted as ones of “graft”—a term that acknowledges the violent and creative processes of suturing arts, and losing and gaining goods, as well as the shifting dynamics among agents who assembled such materials.  By tracing grafted arts from multiple perspectives—Maratha and British, artist and patron, soldier and collector—this book charts the methods of empire-building that recast artistic production and collection in western India and from there across India and in Britain. This mercenary method of artistry propagated mixed, fractured, and plundered arts. Indeed, these “grafted arts”—disseminated across India and Britain over the nineteenth century to aid in consolidating empire or revolting against it entirely—remain instigators of nationalist agitation today.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art