Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India offers a welcome examination of the work of the many British artists active in India during the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century—including Johann Zoffany, William Hodges, Thomas and William Daniell, Tilly Kettle, James Baillie Fraser, Arthur William Devis, and Robert Home—as well as a double-barreled thesis. The art that these men produced on the subcontinent stimulated the Romantic Movement in England, the authors believe, and, in turn, was transformed into the “cultural imperatives” of the Victorian era in Great Britain, these assertions thereby necessitating a look at artists like William Blake and J.M.W. Turner as well. Respected scholars of British Romantic literature Hermione de Almeida and George Gilpin have amassed a great deal of information, and Ashgate Press, in whose series “British Art and Visual Culture since 1750” this book is the tenth entry, has generously given them ample if not uniformly great reproductions, an expansive design, and copious wordage. Coupled with the large amount of material already published on British India, one might expect this plentitude to provide opportunities for repetitiveness. In particular, the 2004 William Hodges exhibition at the National Maritime Museum and David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (New York: Oxford, 2001) offer recent instances of, on the one hand, an intensive reading of an artist who figures strongly in this account and, on the other, a critical analysis of an imperialism that comprises its core. Luckily, the authors are adept at synthesizing recent scholarship and combining the results with their own fresh insights. Artists whose work is spotlighted in Indian Renaissance take on added import in the book’s context.

As Indian Renaissance unfolds, the orderliness of its layout and the lengths to which an idea is allowed to proliferate reveal how devoted research and passionate writing, matched with a determination to see Romanticism as an interdisciplinary project, can lead to enriching paths of thought. For example, part 1, “The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave,” introduces the reader to British India via the story of “Tipu’s tiger” along with accounts of the Great Banyan Tree and the Cave-Temple at Elephanta, pauses for a discussion of “the Indian Prospect in English Romantic Art and Literature,” and concludes in a discourse on India as an ideal: “Ancient India as the Uroffenbarung of the Romantic Era” (60–3). Before I read this book, I am not sure I could have imagined a chapter beginning with the somewhat tawdry wood sculpture of a Tiger mauling an Englishman, which Tipu Sultan, erstwhile “Tiger of Mysore” and British foe, caused to be made as a “joke” for his court before he was defeated in 1799 and the object (it was also a miniature organ) eventually hauled back to London as booty, and ending with Friedrich von Schlegel’s acquisition of Sanskrit (in Paris), which in turn led to his postulation of an originary Indian tradition of wisdom and culture tied to German Romantic thought. But the authors pull it off and, for good measure, close the chapter with a discussion of The Lusiads, Luis Vas de Camoes’ 1572 poem about Vasco da Gama’s Indian voyage that was first translated from the Portuguese into English in 1776, because, as “an epic of commerce and colonialism,” the authors explain, it “was relevant and current for Romantic Britain during its Indian Renaissance” (63).

Parts 2 through 7 proceed with a similarly conscientious fullness, dwelling not only on the “English [sic] artists who traveled east to India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (vii) as well as their art, but also explicating how this art “found a recurrent place in the imaginative inquiries of the Romantic Movement in England [sic],” (vii) by which is meant the larger cultural picture encompassing everything from poetry and novels to painting and graphic art. (Not everyone would call Zoffany or Fraser “English,” though both undoubtedly were implicated in English art; however, as near as I can tell, the authors appear to employ “British” and “English” interchangeably, which is not a universal usage.) Acknowledging that their notion of an “Indian Renaissance” in British Romantic art and culture “is a very large claim by any measure” (vii), because India generally has been assumed to be of marginal concern to British cultural production, the authors make the welcome assertion that they nonetheless pursue their claim “with reckless abandon” (vii), willingly taking the kind of risk more discipline-bound academic work tends to avoid these days. They are content to let the idea of “Renaissance” play out in a variety of places in the text and footnotes, alert to the uses of the term when coupled to “Oriental” or “India” in the eighteenth and nineteenth century no less than in their own very contemporary thesis. On the other hand, “prospect” is pinned down early in the foreword, firmly and clearly explicated, and, indeed, insisted upon as a sine qua non: ”The prospect of India in British Romantic art and culture is limited only by the assumptions of those who would not see” (viii). For “prospect,” the authors claim an art-historical, philosophical, and political/imperial scope: “the artist’s first encompassing glance . . . the broad vista of the triptych or panorama, the grand spectacle or commanding sight, the visual insight or determination, the visualization or opening to view of an unknown entity, the visionary possibility of something new, the visual anticipation of discovery . . . the conceptual expectation of recovery . . . the visually-derived topographical perspectives of the colonial or imperial prospector . . .” (viii).

To be sure, the authors’ enthusiasm for their subject can get out of hand. In their inventory of “prospect’s” domain, I sometimes got lost. (What does “broad vista of the triptych” refer to?) Their readings of paintings, while spirited, were at moments uneven and occasionally baffling. A long discussion of Zoffany’s Death of the Royal Tiger (ca.1795)—illustrated by a mezzotint, Tiger Hunting in the East Indies (ca.1795), which the authors describe as “identical” to the painting—brings up an Indian woman who is said to be “kneeling on the ground” and a “focus” of the composition because of the “pathos and courage” she shows (270).

There is a woman but she is not kneeling. She looks like she is running away. Elsewhere one might observe that there are not “hundreds” of people in Zoffany’s Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match (1784–6), and the Nayars of Malabar in Forbes’ watercolor are not “naked” (139 & 140), but they are given as the visual reference for Zoffany’s Colonel Antoine Polier with His Friends Claud Martin, John Wombwell and the Artist (1786–7). Frustratingly, on still other occasions the authors might have been more forthcoming. The discussions of Zoffany, for example, would have benefited from more specificity. Zoffany’s “ironic” involvement in India, his “ironic comment” on well-dressed Europeans versus “naked Indian figures,” the “fond irony” of the painter’s self-portraying role in Colonel Antoine Polier with His Friends, a painting that never ceases to fascinate—these all occur on a single page (140) but are not qualified sufficiently to enable the reader to get a handle on irony’s purport(s). It is entirely possible that Schlegel’s concept of “Romantic Irony” is at issue here, though; if so, it might be too liberally and freely used.

The text contains a few minor disappointments and a single major one. The minor disappointments could have been averted had a copyeditor’s scrutiny been more rigorously applied to grammar—indeterminate pronouns, enough typos to be noticeable—as well as to slips: the wrong century for Tiepolo, a stunningly inappropriate reference to Calcutta as a “black hole” for Governor-General Warren Hastings after his wife departed. Most crucially, the locations of unillustrated paintings that are discussed at length (like George Chinnery’s portrait of Charlotte Greer) or mark an important comparison (like paintings of the death of Dido by Sir Joshua Reynolds or Henry Fuseli in relation to depictions of sati in India) should have been given.

With the exception of the last reproof, however, these are quibbles, and the advantages of the authors’ broadly cast net, as they call their immensely learned and ambitious approach, far outweighs any flaws. As the reader reaches the volume’s final sections, a sense of various strands extending from India to England coming together in imperialism’s blanketing vastness is inescapable. And absorbing. Essays on Blake, Turner, and Chinnery offer connections and resolutions predicated on the ineluctability of empire. On a minor level, Turner’s ties to India were personal: he was the friend of a man whose cousin was the victim in the actual event on which “Tipu’s tiger” was based as well as an associate of those most famous of the viewtakers of India, Thomas and William Daniell. A reader of Sir William Jones’s treatise On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India, Turner was also a thoughtful interpreter of the decline and fall of empires. De Almeida and Gilpin range from Turner’s Lieber Studiorum through “mythic lessons” in his paintings of the Garden of the Hesperides and Hannibal in the Alps to uncover the Indian underpinnings in the artist’s well-known “images of energy vortices both creative and destructive” (295). Their handling of Blake is equally expansive, but the problem with including Chinnery as a final case study is that he is an artist of a different order and perhaps suffers in such exalted company.

Giving British artists in India their due, not merely by examining their work but also by staking an ambitious claim for its significance, this book merits attention. That it also proposes for the origin and political usefulness of English Romanticism tenets important for art history and for literature studies makes it required reading.