The wing span of “Painters, Ports, and Profits” rivals that of the bat, covering a century of art (much of it beautiful) and history (much of it heinous). There are 115 items in the show, most of them paintings, prints, or drawings but also books, a very handsome watercolor box, and even handsomer piece of chintz.
Among the more exotic items is a watercolor scroll, from 1826, showing the Indian city of Lucknow. Speaking of wing span, its length is 37 feet long when fully extended.
Gangaram Chintaman Navgire Tambat’s pen-and-ink rendering of a rhinoceros is at once enchanting — it gives Das’s bat a run for its money — and a memorable example of one of the show’s themes: the artistic interaction between East and West. Even though Tambat is highly unlikely to have ever seen Albrecht Dürer’s celebrated 1515 woodcut of a rhinoceros, the viewer likely has. Conversely, Shaikh Muhammad Amir of Karraya was very likely aware of George Stubbs’s horse canvases when he painted his watercolor “A Bay Racehorse with a Groom.”
Although “Painters” doesn’t emphasize individual artists, whether Indian, Chinese, or European (all of whom figure in the show), Tambat emerges as its artistic star. He has 20 works on display, both watercolors and drawings.
Its true star isn’t a someone but a something: the East India Company. And that brings us back to exotic items, though these lack the charm of either bat, scroll, or rhinoceros. They’re five prints showing an unusual artistic subject: the company’s opium factory, in Patna, and another, entitled “The Opium Fleet Descending The Ganges en Route to Calcutta.” All are by Walter Stanhope Sherwill and all are from 1851.
An alternate title for the exhibition could have been “Tea and Opium,” the two great sources of company profits. It was forcing opium on China, to compensate for the company’s outlays to China for tea, that took its commercial activities beyond your basic level of Western exploitation, ultimately leading to the First and Second Opium Wars, with China defeated in both.
The company’s name may seem a bit confusing today. Yes, it was a company, but in India during the 18th and much of the 19th centuries it functioned as a de facto government. Yes, it was in India, but its reach also extended to include the Strait of Malacca and southern China (from which it exported all that tea, as well as porcelains and silk). “India” referred to Asia generally when Elizabeth I granted the company its charter, in 1600: “India” as in “East Indies.”
One of the show’s strengths is how it neither shies away from the company’s dark history nor lets that history overwhelm the exhibition. The balance between “painters” and “ports and profits” is judiciously maintained. In addition to the artistic interaction of East and West, as noted above, there’s also the sheer diversity of the artists on display: not just professionals but also amateurs, and soldiers.
Soldiers? True, 18th- and 19th-century military officers needed to be good draftsmen, the better to master cartography and topography. There was also the larger recognition of — well, Warren Hastings, the first British governor-general of India, did not mince words: “Every accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state.”
New Haven is many thousands of miles distant from India, but there is a direct connection between the two — and specifically Yale and the East India Company. Elihu Yale, the university’s namesake, went to India to work for the company and made his fortune there. Every accumulation of knowledge, one might say, is useful to higher education.
Rina Banerjee’s installation “Take me, take me, take me … to the Palace of love” offers a playful and inviting counterpoint to “Painters.” It’s a mini Taj Mahal, though sitting in the YCBA lobby it looks pretty maxi. It’s made of vibrantly pink plastic over a copper-and-steel frame.
“Take me” isn’t directly connected to “Painters, Ports, and Profits” but it’s very much in conversation with it. Where “Painters” is chastening and transporting, “Take me” is charming and also transporting, albeit in a very different way. It’s up through Sept. 13.
PAINTERS, PORTS, AND PROFITS: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850
RINA BANERJEE: Take me, take me, take me … to the Palace of love
At Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St., New Haven, through June 21 and Sept. 13, respectively. 203-432-2800, britishart.yale.edu
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.
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