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  • Imperial Lives: Two Children in Asian Clothing
  • Giorgio Riello (bio)

The world of the eighteenth century has been described by historians as one of increasing connectedness. The rising power of the European empires—and of the British Empire in particular—secured unprecedented levels of trade and exchange. The trade of the European East India companies in South Asia, for example, entailed the exchange of gifts to ease diplomatic and commercial relations. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century portraits had come to dominate such gift relationships. Dozens of portraits of King George III were sent to India in exchange for which local rulers and princes gifted their own oil portraits. This practice necessitated the services of European painters as large-canvas portraits were an artistic genre absent in Indian art. The first of such European artists to reach India was the Englishman Tilly Kettle (1735–86). To him and another dozen European artists we owe not just a remarkable number of state portraits but also more informal and personal portraits of European East India Company servants and their families living in India. These portraits remind us of the importance of individuals’ lives in shaping larger histories of empire and trade. While the interest for rich Nabobs has been longstanding, historians such as Miles Ogborn, Linda Colley, and Margot Finn have recently claimed the importance of recovering the complexity that personal, family, and collective “micro” stories provide in wider historical frameworks.1

These “life stories” open a series of questions on what Emma Rothschild has termed the “inner life of Empires”: how people shaped the “empire project” and how they negotiated personal, familial, and sentimental ties across vast transoceanic spaces.2 One such case is a portrait of two anonymous children, attributed to Tilly Kettle and recently acquired by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Behind the loveliness of its subject matter, this double portrait embodies the lives of many who in the eighteenth century inhabited a world that sat between two continents, Europe and Asia. This was a world of [End Page 197] opportunities and the allure of Indian wealth but, as the painting and the artist’s biography show, it was also a world in which what was represented was more a dream than a reality. Both childhood and Asia are sites of illusion.

Tilly Kettle was born in London in 1735, the son of a house painter. He was trained in the British capital, and as many other metropolitan artists at the time he was influenced by Reynolds, though he was neither one of his pupils nor one of his most important followers. As a middle-rank artist, he made a name for himself outside London, especially by touring Oxfordshire and the Midlands between 1762 and 1764.3 Although technically gifted, he lacked patronage, those contacts that could have secured him a steady flow of wealthy patrons. This might explain why in his early thirties, he decided to seek his fortune in India. Kettle was a pioneer as, when he reached Madras in 1769, he was the first professional British painter in the subcontinent. He was soon followed by another dozen artists and engravers who reached India before 1785.4 We know little of Kettle’s life in the subcontinent. Later artists were warned by word of mouth about the terrible discomforts including the lack of colors and other materials for painting. Kettle was a neophyte but managed to survive a risky six-month voyage and once in India “those horrid Indian fevers of which I had heard so much during our voyage.”5 One-third of those Europeans who reached India did not survive long.

As the first British artist in India, Kettle was the undisputed master of a new portraiture market. He spent the first two years of his seven-year Indian stay in Madras where he received the patronage of the Nawab of Arcot, Muhammad Ali. Later, he moved to Kolcatta, then in British hands, and from Kolcatta to Faizabad where he received the patronage of one of the best-known Indian rulers, Shujaud-daula, Vizier of the Mughal Empire and Nawab of Oudh, here portrayed with his more famous—one might say...

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