Associate Professor Holly Shaffer will speak during the Bettman Lecture Series, organized by the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York. Her talk titled “Who Makes a Company's Art? Meditations on Artists, Commerce, and the East India Company, 1750-1850” will speak to the forthcoming exhibition, Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850, which will open at the Yale Center for British Art in January 2026. She will focus on how the global reach of the East India Company linked an astonishingly varied group of artists—amateurs, soldiers, as well as professional artists from India, Britain, and China—into a vast network across Asia. Artists' creative exchanges and their experimentations with papers, pigments and techniques created a striking visual language that connected their art to the global economy.
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