Enfilade

Unknown artist (Company style), Breadnut (Artocarpus camansi), ca. 1825, watercolor, gouache, and graphite on medium, slightly textured, cream laid paper, sheet: 15 × 19 1/4 inches (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, B2022.5).

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From the press release for the exhibition, which opens today:

Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850

Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 8 January — 21 June 2026

Curated by Laurel Peterson and Holly Shaffer

The Yale Center for British Art presents Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850 from January 8 through June 21, 2026. Spanning a century of artistic production, the exhibition reveals the material and technical innovations of the Indian, Chinese, and British artists whose work and lives were shaped by the British East India Company’s global reach. Featuring more than one hundred objects, Painters, Ports, and Profits highlights the beauty and range of the extraordinary artwork produced within the context of one of the most powerful and ruthless corporations in history.

“This exhibition brings to light an astonishing chapter of global art history, when artistic innovation and exchange flourished under the shadow of empire,” said Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director of the Yale Center for British Art. “It tells the story of direct encounters between artists from different continents and traditions, who responded to one another by experimenting with new materials and methods. We are thrilled to share these important, and rarely seen, works from our collection and to invite new reflection on their artistic legacy.”

Between 1750 and 1850, the Company’s growing commercial, military, and political operations linked an incredibly varied group of artists—amateurs, soldiers, and professionals—into a vast network that stretched from London to Calcutta (Kolkata) to Canton (Guangzhou). As goods, people, and ideas circulated through the Company’s networks, artists experimented with papers, pigments, and methods, adapting techniques from different traditions to develop a striking visual language that connected art to the expanding global economy.

“We are excited to take visitors on a journey to ports and trading cities across India and China where artists produced captivating and innovative works of art,” said exhibition curators Laurel O. Peterson and Holly Shaffer. “The period of the East India Company is one in which art and business intersected. There is a profound tension between the ventures of a global corporation and the works of beauty created by the artists in its orbit. With technical brilliance, these artists ingeniously fused traditions and materials together to develop new ways of making, picturing, and selling.”

Years in development, the preparations for Painters, Ports and Profits included extensive original research and careful technical study by curators and conservators at the YCBA in collaboration with conservation scientists at Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage. The resulting exhibition illuminates the museum’s deep holdings of Asian art, showcasing many exceptional works that have hardly ever or never been displayed. Highlights of the exhibition include stunning small- and large-scale portraits, such as the monumental Woman Holding a Hookah at Faizabad, India (1772) by Tilly Kettle and the intimate Portrait of a Woman (ca. 1850) by an artist from the circle of eminent painter Lam Qua. Watercolor drawings of a great Indian fruit bat by Bhawani Das (1778–82) and breadnut by an artist once known (ca. 1825), among others, record the flora and fauna of the Company’s domain with striking naturalism. A spectacular thirty-seven-foot-long scroll uses delicate watercolor to depict the city of Lucknow, India, in panoramic detail, which recent technical analysis has revealed was completed by multiple artists working in collaboration.

Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850 is organized by the Yale Center for British Art. The exhibition is curated by Laurel O. Peterson, Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the YCBA, and Holly Shaffer, Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University.

r e l a t e d  p r o g r a m m i n g

First Look | Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850
Thursday, 15 January, 4pm, Lecture Hall and Livestream

Spring Exhibitions Openings
Thursday, 26 February, 4pm, Lecture Hall and Livestream

Curator Tours
Thursdays, 22 January, 26 March, 16 April, 21 May, and 18 June, 4pm

Docent Tours
Saturdays, 3pm

The catalogue is published by YCBA and distributed by Yale UP:

Laurel O. Peterson and Holly Shaffer, eds., Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2026), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0300286540, $65. With contributions by Mark Aronson, Tim Barringer, Swati Chattopadhyay, Soyeon Choi, Anita Dey, Gillian Forrester, Navina Najat Haidar, Richard R. Hark, Emma Hartman, Brooke Krancer, Margaret Masselli, Kaylani Madhura Ramachandran, Romita Ray, Yuthika Sharma, Marcie Wiggins, Winnie Wong, and Tom Young.

Featuring more than one hundred objects drawn primarily from the YCBA’s collection, including architectural drawings, watercolors, and hand-colored aquatints, the catalog critically reconsiders the vibrant creative exchanges between artists in India, China, and Britain during a period driven by ruthless commercial and colonial expansion.

Aimee Ng, the exhibition’s curator, is the subject of a recent feature by Alexandra Starr in The New York Times (20 December 2025). From the press release (3 November 2025) for the exhibition:

Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture

The Frick Collection, New York, 12 February — 11 May 2026

Curated by Aimee Ng

Thomas Gainsborough, Mary, Countess Howe, 1763–64, oil on canvas, 243 × 154 cm (English Heritage, Kenwood House, London).

Beginning 12 February 2026, The Frick Collection will present its first special exhibition dedicated to the English artist Thomas Gainsborough, and the first devoted to his portraiture ever held in New York. Displaying more than two dozen paintings, the show will explore the richly interwoven relationship between Gainsborough’s portraits and fashion in the eighteenth century. The works included represent some of the greatest achievements from every stage of this period-defining artist’s career, drawn from the Frick’s holdings and from collections across North America and the United Kingdom.

The trappings and trade of fashion filled the artist’s world—in magazines and tailor shops, at the opera and on promenades—and his portraits were at the heart of it all. This exhibition invites visitors to consider not only the actual clothing the painter depicted, but also the role of his canvases as both records of and players in the larger conception of fashion: encompassing everything from class, wealth, labor, and craft to formality, intimacy, and time. Recent technical investigations also shed light on Gainsborough’s artistic process, including connections to materials that fueled the fashion industry.

Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture is organized by Aimee Ng, the museum’s Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. She states: “The spectacular and at times, to modern eyes, absurd fashions in portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and his contemporaries continue to fascinate viewers today. The appeal of these demonstrations of taste, status, and wealth persists in tension with increased recognition, over the last few decades, of the injustices that often made such extravagance possible. This exhibition necessarily deals with clothing and personal attire, while exploring how fashion was understood in Gainsborough’s time, how it touched every level of society, and how portraiture itself was as much a construction and invention as a sitter’s style.”

Aimee Ng, Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture (New York: Rizzoli Electa, 2026), 200 pages, ISBN: 978-0847876235, $50. With an additional essay by Kari Rayner.

The exhibition is complemented by a richly illustrated catalogue authored by Aimee Ng, with an additional essay by Kari Rayner, Associate Conservator of Paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Along with entries for each work in the show, the catalogue features essays on portraiture and self-fashioning in Gainsborough’s era, on materials and techniques that linked clothing and paintings, and on the roles of class and time in eighteenth-century style. The volume considers how and why Gainsborough and his sitters—from dukes and duchesses to the artist’s family members to the once-enslaved writer and composer Ignatius Sancho—shaped how they would be immortalized in paint. The book also touches on the longstanding appeal of Gainsborough’s art, particularly its renewed popularity a century after the painter’s death among American collectors such as the Fricks, Vanderbilts, and Huntingtons.

Major support for Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture is provided by an anonymous donor in honor of Ian Wardropper. Additional funding is provided by Barbara and Bradford Evans, Kathleen Feldstein, Michael and Jane Horvitz, Dr. Arlene P. McKay, The Helen Clay Frick Foundation, James K. Kloppenburg, David and Kate Bradford, Katie von Strasser – InspiratumColligere, the Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation, Edward Lee Cave, Mr. and Mrs. Hubert L. Goldschmidt, Jennifer Schnabl, the Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Foundation, Bradley Isham Collins and Amy Fine Collins, Siri and Bob Marshall, Bailey Foote, Alexander Mason Hankin, Brittany Beyer Harwin and Zachary Harwin, and Otto Naumann and Heidi D. Shafranek. The exhibition catalogue is funded by Dr. Tai-Heng Cheng.

Exhibition photo with a mid-19th-century plaster cast after Balthasar Permoser’s ‘Saxon Hercules’. As noted on the SKD’s Instagram account, “The original crowned the Wall Pavilion of the Dresden Zwinger from 1718 to 1945, symbolising its patron, Augustus the Strong, with his astonishing physical strength and the Herculean efforts he undertook every day as the Saxon-Polish ruler. Where Hercules dwells with the vault of heaven, the Garden of the Hesperides cannot be far away. And so Permoser’s Hercules gazed upon the orange trees in the Zwinger courtyard, which bore the apples of the Hesperides, as it were, and promised Saxony a golden age.”

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From the press release for the exhibition:

Hercules: Hero and Anti-Hero

Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Zwinger, Dresden, 22 November 2025 — 28 June 2026

Hercules (‘Heracles’ in Greek), the best-known hero of classical antiquity, is one of the most enduring and popular mythical figures anywhere in the world. His name is universally known, and the phrase ‘a Herculean task’ is an everyday expression for anything requiring extraordinary strength and effort.

The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Dresden State Art Collections, SKD) is dedicating an exhibition to this demigod in the Winckelmann Forum of the Semper Gallery of the Zwinger. With Hercules: Hero and Anti-Hero, the Skulpturensammlung bis 1800 (Sculpture Collection up to 1800) and the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters Picture Gallery) present a wide range of depictions of this mythological character. Featuring 135 objects, including top-quality sculptures, paintings, prints, coins, armour, and works of the goldsmith’s art, the exhibition explores the question of why Hercules has been such a fascinating figure for millennia and continues to be so today—one need only think, for example, of some of the major films of recent years.

As the son of the supreme deity Zeus and the Theban queen Alcmene, Hercules was a demigod—with superhuman strength and human flaws. His popularity was revived during the Renaissance. In Rome, dozens of large-scale Hercules statues were already known in the sixteenth century, and these had a huge influence on early modern art. The exhibition showcases works of art from classical antiquity to the neoclassical period, with some glimpses into the present day. Alongside objects from the rich holdings of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, there are prestigious loans from such eminent institutions as the Vatican Museums in Rome, the Prado in Madrid, the Louvre in Paris, and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.

In a prologue and five chapters, the exhibition explores the famous ‘Labours of Hercules’, his relationships with women, his anti-heroic escapades, and his role as a model of virtue for rulers such as Alexander the Great and August the Strong. Balthasar Permoser’s colossal Saxon Hercules, created for the Rampart Pavilion of the Dresden Zwinger, bears witness to this.

Hercules was evidently not only strong and virtuous. In some situations, he behaved dishonourably, succumbed to vice, or committed cruel injustices, even against his own children. He often fought against evil for the good of humanity, but he was also a murderer, rapist, drunkard, and thief. Through significant works of art and an extensive accompanying programme, the exhibition encourages reflection on the role of heroism in history and its relevance in our society today. Particular attention is paid to the extraordinary narrative richness of the myth.

Videos telling eight of the stories about Hercules have been created specially for the exhibition. Dresden-born actor Martin Brambach—known for his role as Chief Inspector Peter Michael Schnabel in the television series Tatort—relates important and amusing episodes from the life of the hero and anti-hero. A multimedia guide is available free of charge.

Holger Jacob-Friesen, ed., Herkules: Held und Antiheld (Dresden: Sandstein Kultur, 2025), 200 pages, ISBN: 978-3954988945, €38.

Opening soon at The Courtauld:

A View of One’s Own: Landscapes by British Women Artists, 1760–1860

The Courtauld Gallery, London, 28 January 2026 — 20 May 2026

Curated by Rachel Sloan

A View of One’s Own showcases landscape drawings and watercolours by British women artists working between 1760 and 1860 whose work represents a growing area of The Courtauld’s collection. These artists range from highly accomplished amateurs to those ambitious for more formal recognition. They have remained mostly unknown, and their works largely unpublished.

When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, its members included two women; yet there would not be another female academician until Dame Laura Knight was elected in 1936. Despite this institutional exclusion, women artists in Britain continued to train, practice, and exhibit during this period, particularly in the field of landscape watercolours. This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue shed new light on these artists, working within a heavily male-dominated era in the arts. Some of the artists achieved recognition during their lifetimes while others’ work remained private. The ten artists featured include Harriet Lister and Lady Mary Lowther, who were among the first to depict the Lake District; Amelia Long, Lady Farnborough, one of the first British artists to travel to France following the Napoleonic Wars; and Elizabeth Batty, whose works appearing in the show were rediscovered only a few years ago.

Artists: Harriet Lister, Mary Lowther, Mary Mitford, Elizabeth Susan Percy, Mary Smirke, Eliza Gore; Fanny Blake, Amelia Long, Elizabeth Batty, and Richenda Gurney.

Rachel Sloan, ed., A View of One’s Own: Landscapes by British Women Artists, 1760–1860 (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2026), 72 pages, ISBN: 978-1913645977, £20. With contributions by Susan Owens, Rachel Sloan, and Paris Spies-Gans.

Rachel Sloan is Associate Curator for Works on Paper at The Courtauld Gallery. Paris A. Spies-Gans is a historian and art historian, with a focus on gender and culture in Britain and France during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries; she is currently a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Susan Owens, formerly Curator of Paintings at the V&A, is an independent scholar; she has published widely on 19th-century British art and culture and has a particular interest in drawing and landscape.