Colonialism in the Photographic Archive

Paris A. Spies-Gans, a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, specialises in the study of women artists and their work. In this feature, she asks what can be learned from seeking out art created by British women that engages with imperial activities, looking specifically at images recorded in the PMC’s newlydigitised photographic archive.

In Calcutta in May 1792, amid British celebrations of the Treaty of Srirangapatam which ended the Third Anglo-Mysore War (1790–92) – to profound British gains and Mysorean losses – two painted tapestries appeared as decorations at the Ord and Knox general store. Each contained a portrait of a man surrounded by the spoils of war: one showed Earl Cornwallis, Britain’s Governor-General of India, accompanied by female allegories of history and fame; the other portrayed General William Medows, the recently appointed Governor of Madras. The Madras Courier speculated as to the paintings’ creator: ‘These pieces, we understand, were from the hands of a female artist, whose reputation in the portrait line increases with every production of her pencil.’ It is thought that this refers to the Norfolkborn painter Sarah Baxter, born Buck (c. 1770–?), who had arrived in India in the first half of 1791 after marrying John Baxter, a widower and former partner at that same general store.

Sarah Baxter is one of about 320 women represented in the Paul Mellon Centre’s Photographic Archive, a collection of roughly 100,000 recently digitised reference images spanning British art history that was made available for public use in November 2021. In a reflection of the amount of attention they have traditionally received in scholarship, pieces by women form the minority (less than 2 per cent) of this massive resource; an even smaller portion of these works render colonial subject matter. While both statistics are at odds with the historical record – since at least the mid-eighteenth century, women have formed a much larger proportional presence of artistic communities than these numbers suggest, and the effects of Britain’s global imperialism left few populations untouched and unscathed – several works in the archive open rare and significant windows onto the intricate intersection of these two worlds.

As historical scholarship has begun to stress, white women –artists and others – have often acted as oppressors, even while they were themselves oppressed. In late eighteenth-century Britain, for instance, men were gradually accruing political and legal rights that women would not gain for more than a century; yet Britons of all stripes were participating in their nation’s rapidly growing imperial complex. This tension – which would grow as the nineteenth century progressed – characterises several of the paintings by female artists in the photo archive, works that challenge us to scrutinise women’s places in the colonial project and to consider how their depictions project, reinforce and reflect the various biases of their times.

Let us begin with Sarah Baxter. Although her biographical details are hazy and she has not been the subject of study for nearly half a century, it is clear that she was a recognised portraitist in her time. Upon her marriage in January 1791, the Norfolk Chronicle described her as ‘well known in this city for her ingenuity in painting’. That May, she exhibited at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, where her Portrait of a Gentleman was deemed sufficiently skilled to be hung in the Great Room. After departing for India later that year, where her new husband was branching out into the indigo trade while continuing to work with Ord and Knox, she continued to paint, while also giving birth to three sons.

Archival record for Sarah Baxter, The Artist’s Son, undated.

Courtesy of Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive PA-F08217-0003 (CC BYNC 4.0).

In 1792 or 1793, Baxter painted an unusual oil portrait of her second son, which appears in the photo archive. An inscription on the back tells us the child’s name, Nadir, replete with Persian honorifics from the Mughal court: ‘Portrait of Nadir ool Moulk Mahomed al Dowlah Baxter Bahadour Dowlut Rajah’ (translated by Mildred Archer as ‘rare one of the Kingdom, praiseworthy one of the state, Baxter champion of the dynasty’). Emerging from the strokes of his mother’s paintbrush, Nadir appears visually enmeshed in the world of the Indian subcontinent. Accompanied by an Indian man and woman, he sits before colourful piles of flowers and fruit, grapes in hand. The woman is presumably an ‘ayah’, a term used at the time for the Indian women who cared for the children of countless British families. Little more is known about the painting’s background, subject matter, or Baxter’s life; it is thought that she died in childbirth a few years later.

Baxter’s canvas is both an unambiguous product of colonialism and evidence of its massive complexities. What did it mean for a young woman from Norfolk to portray this Indian man and woman alongside her child, and did they have any say in the matter? Why did she and her husband choose a Persian name for their son? Was the inscription on the canvas’s back a joke (as it has been described by Archer), an act of cultural appropriation, or both? What cruelties and subtleties lie at the intersection of imperial portraiture and gender roles?

Numerous paintings in the photo archive pose similarly tortuous questions. At the same time, they provide rare visual clues as to how British women engaged with their increasingly imperial world in markedly different ways. How can we begin to study these wide-ranging works with the seriousness and depth they demand? For now, I would like to focus not on any answers the images can provide, but on some of the questions they invite us to ask. Sarah Stone, later Smith (active 1770s; died 1844), for one, built a short career as a natural history painter when the London-based collector Sir Ashton Lever hired her to depict the objects in his public collection. In 1781, she exhibited four images of birds and shells at the Royal Academy; she showed one more work in 1786, Perspective View of Sir Ashton Lever’s Museum (1785). Three of her watercolours – maybe among those she exhibited, maybe not – appear in the photo archive: A Parrot and a Butterfly (1779), A Red Parrott (1786) and the undated Scarlet Ibis. It is not known whether Stone ever left the British Isles, yet her artistic career was fuelled by the objects and animals that Lever had accumulated from imperial plundering: the red parrot would have been native to Central and South America or Australia; the scarlet ibis to South America and the Caribbean. What would Stone’s experience of these objects have been – as geographic curiosities, largely visual or, simply, financially transactional?

Women’s artistic activity quickly expanded alongside Britain’s empire, which famously covered a quarter of the globe by the mid-nineteenth century. It also soon came to reflect some core tenets of the emerging suffrage movement. By the 1850s, female artists were beginning to push for access to education in formerly closed-off spaces, with growing success. In 1862, Edith Martineau (1842–1909) was one of the first women admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. She established a professional career from her time as a student, exhibiting and selling extensively. The photo archive has two of her works: an interior portrait of a well-off woman (Mrs John Roget) and Head of a Balkan Tribesman (1867), typical of Martineau’s surviving ethnographically tinged studies. Her attention to detail in these latter pieces—the grizzled beards, the specific turbans—suggests that Martineau encountered these men in person, perhaps in the streets of London, by then the world’s most international city. Or was she painting figures according to popular, ethnically inflected physiognomic rules, now seen as a strong basis for scientific racism?

Similar questions arise in response to a work by Jane Hawkins (1841–1904), a portraitist who specialised in political figures and who painted Maharajah Duleep Singh of Elveden Wearing Maharajah’s Robes, replicating an 1854 portrait by Franz Xaver Winterhalter. Singh, the last Maharajah of the Sikh Empire, was exiled to Britain at the age of fifteen; Queen Victoria became godmother to several of his children. In 1984 – we learn from annotations to this image in the photo archive – Hawkins’s canvas was auctioned by Christie’s as part of a large group of works being sold from Elveden Hall. Might her painting have been commissioned by Singh or a member of his family? Or was it acquired by the estate later, and perhaps originally a status symbol for one of Singh’s contemporaries? Striking, jarring and often exceedingly detailed, these paintings expand our understanding of the imagery of imperialism in relation to women artists and call on us to reconsider the dominant narratives of the history of art. By building a framework that is both more inclusive and more critical, we can continue to question and advance pressing methods for learning from the intricacies, atrocities and inequalities of a discriminatory past.

Archival record for Janet Hawkins after Winterhalter, Maharajah Duleep Singh Of Elveden Wearing Maharajah’s Robes, undated, oil on canvas, 198.1 × 106.6 cm.

Courtesy of Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive PA-F048140003 (CC BY-NC 4.0).