Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India is the first comprehensive examination of British artists whose first-hand impressions and prospects of the Indian subcontinent became a stimulus for the Romantic Movement in England; it is also a survey of the transformation of the images brought home by these artists into the cultural imperatives of imperial, Victorian Britain. The book proposes a second - Indian - Renaissance for British (and European) art and culture and an undeniable connection between English Romanticism and British Imperialism. Artists treated in-depth include James Forbes, James Wales, Tilly Kettle, William Hodges, Johann Zoffany, Francesco Renaldi, Thomas and William Daniell, Robert Home, Thomas Hickey, Arthur William Devis, R. H. Colebrooke, Alexander Allan, Henry Salt, James Baillie Fraser, Charles Gold, James Moffat, Charles D'Oyly, William Blake, J. M. W. Turner and George Chinnery.

Examines the role of the East India Company in the production and development of British art, demonstrating how art and related forms of culture were closely tied to commerce and the rise of the commercial state. This book examines the role of the East India Company in the production and development of British art during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a new "school" of British art was in its formative stages with the foundation of exhibiting societies and the Royal Academy in 1768. It focuses on the Company's patronage, promotion and uses of art, both in Britain and in India and the Far East, and how the Company and its trade with the East were represented visually, through maritime imagery, landscape, genre painting and print-making. It also considers how, for artists such as William Hodges and Arthur William Devis, the East India Company, and its provision of a wealthy market in British India, provided opportunities for career advancement, through alignment with Company commercial principles. In this light, the book's main concern is to address the conflicted and ambiguous nature of art produced in the service of a corporation that was the "scandal of empire" for most of its existence, and how this has shaped and distorted our understanding of the history of British art in relation to the concomitant rise of Britain as a self-consciously commercial and maritime nation, whose prosperity relied upon global expansion, increasing colonialism and the development of mercantile organisations.

Narrative interspersed with reproduction of paintings of Thomas Daniell, 1749-1840, and William Daniell, 1769-1837, British landscape artists.