Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (review)

Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting. By Beth Fowkes Tobin (Durham, Duke University Press, 1999) 306 pp. $54.95 cloth $18.95 paper

Picturing Imperial Power offers both less and more than its title promises--less, because the bulk of the book covers only the last quarter of the eighteenth century; more, because it treats paintings from North America, Calcutta, and the West Indies, by artists from British America, Italy, and India, as well as from Britain itself. Tobin forges an eclectic methodology to cope with such catholic materials. The opening chapter invokes a panoply of theorists to almost comic effect: "Michael Foucault's equation of knowledge with power . . . [t]he Marxist notion of mystification . . . Susan Stewart's and Harriet Guest's discussions of the exotic and Michael Taussig's discussion of mimesis . . . Stuart Hall's and Dick Hebdige's ideas about the semiotics of clothing . . . [and] Judith Butler's discussion of drag, Peggy Phelan's notion of performing identities, and Homi Bhabha's analysis of colonial discourse" all jostle in a single paragraph (15). Tobin describes the result as "cultural studies meets colonial discourse analysis" (13); a more accurate summary might be "the New Imperial History meets the New Art History."

The "subjects" of colonial depiction are as diverse in kind as they are in origin, ranging from African servants in England and Mohawk warriors and Highland soldiers in North America to West Indian slaves, Calcutta judges, and even Indian plants. These subjects comprise both colonialists and colonized; they encompass the victims, the victors, and the spoils of empire. A less precise and historical account might have conflated the various genres in which these subjects were depicted into a single "imperial" discourse, uninflected by time or space and representative of the very homogeneity usually attributed to the process of imperialism itself. The interconnectedness of the late eighteenth-century British Empire enables Tobin to draw her various subjects into dialogue, but her exquisite attention to their rooted particularity prevents any facile assimilation.

Accordingly, the strongest chapters of the book are those with the strongest sense of place and context, particularly the analysis of Benjamin West's "William Penn's Treaty with the Indians" (1771/72) and the account of the much less well-known West Indian scenes by the Italian painter Agostino Brunias. Less novel, because more derivative of the work of such earlier writers as Honour and Dabydeen, is the chapter on black servants in English domestic portraiture. ¹ More challenging, but less conclusive, are the chapters on "Cultural Cross-Dressing in British America" (treating especially the portraits of the Mohawk Joseph Brant and Colonel Guy Johnson, the acting superintendent of Indian Affairs in North America) and on domestic portraiture in British Calcutta. The concluding chapters, on botanical illustration (especially that generated within the global network of Joseph Banks) and "The Imperial Politics of the Local and the Universal," draw together threads from the rest of the book to portray some of the discursive connections throughout the Empire that are discernible across different genres of painting, large and small, taxonomic and individualizing, and personal and corporate. The result is a persuasive depiction of the diversity of empire, as well as of the commonalities and convergences in the representation of its subjects.

The success of the book in juxtaposing apparently disparate materials to illuminating effect comes at the price of effacing other patterns of representation that a more conventional approach to the history of art might have revealed. For example, the chronology of West's career reveals the temporal proximity of his history painting of William Penn's Indian treaty (1771/72) and his portrait of the young Joseph Banks decked in the spoils of the South Seas (c. 1771-1773). What the significance of such an overlap might be is left unexamined. Similarly, the extraordinary number of portraits of British veterans of the Seven Years' War--including John Singleton...