Shaikh Zain al-Din, Indian Roller on Sandalwood Branch, Impey Album, Calcutta, 1780. Gift of Elizabeth and Willard Clark, © Minneapolis Institute of Art

Art in the Age of the East India Company

GETTY CENTER

Museum Lecture Hall


This is a past event


Join acclaimed historian William Dalrymple as he discusses the remarkable story of the East India Company, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power. As Britain's East India Company extended its sway across India in the late 18th century, many exceptional artworks were commissioned by Company officials from Indian painters who had previously worked for the Mughals. Dalrymple celebrates the work of several extraordinary Indian artists, each with their own style, tastes, and agency, all of whom worked for British patrons between the 1770s and the bloody end of the Mughal rule in 1857. His book The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire, was published this year.

This talk is followed by a book signing of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire, which will be available for purchase. William Dalrymple is guest curator of the exhibition Forgotten Masters of Indian Painting for the East India Company 1770–1857, currently on view at the Wallace Collection in London. He is one of Britain’s great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, the Duff Cooper Prize-winning The Last Mughal, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. In 2013 he co-curated the exhibition Princes and Painters in Late Mughal Delhi 1739–1857 with Yuthika Sharma at the Asia Society in New York. In 2018, he was presented with the President’s Medal by The British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. William lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.

Need help?

Contact us!

9 am–5 pm,
7 days a week

(310) 440-7300

VisitorServices
@getty.edu