A Mysterious, Monumental Scroll on Public Display for the First Time Paints a Picture of Artistic Fusion in Colonial India

A new exhibition shares the artistic legacy of centuries of British East India Company influence in East and Southeast Asia

Sonja Anderson

– Daily Correspondent

April 9, 2026 1:45 p.m.

A massive panoramic river scene painted in watercolor and gouache unfurls to reveal fantastical riverboats, pink and white palaces, horses running, and people bathing. The 37-foot-long artwork depicts the Gomti River in the northern city of Lucknow, India. Artists created it in the 1820s using European-style perspective, presumably for a British visitor.

Lucknow From the Gomti is one of more than 100 artworks on display in “Painters, Ports and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850,” a new exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. The show spotlights an artistic era of converging influences in Asia during the commercial reign of the British East India Company.

“We really organized the show to think about artists’ stories who are working in the orbit of the company,” Laurel Peterson, one of the show’s curators, tells the Yale Daily News’ Alex Geldzahler. “They innovated, created these great innovations in order to kind of meet this new market.”

The East India Company was founded in 1600. By the early 19th century, it dominated trade in East and Southeast Asia as an imperialist monopoly with firepower. In addition to their other responsibilities, according to the Yale museum, company agents commissioned art, both to visually record trade locations and to use the works as gifts to sweeten trade deals and build alliances. They often hired local artists to capture “exotic” scenes to send or take home to Britain.

During the century spotlighted by the exhibition, the East India Company’s growing military and political pursuits connected artists living in London to their peers in Calcutta (now called Kolkata), India, and Canton (also known as Guangzhou), China. “We’re looking at these really tight networks of artists and kind of how they learn from each other, how they innovate, how they kind of create new techniques,” exhibition co-curator Holly Shaffer, an art historian at Brown University, tells the Yale Daily News.

One piece on display, A Marriage Procession by Night, Patna, depicts a groom’s family walking to the home of his new bride. It’s an example of the “Company painting” style that became popular among Indian artists, who aimed to please tourists and trade agents by using watercolors in a European style and color palette.

Other works in the show focus on nature and natural resources. A Great Indian Fruit Bat or Flying Fox, painted by Bhawani Das in the late 18th century, is part of a series on Indian plants and animals commissioned by Elijah Impey, the chief justice of British India’s highest court, and his wife, Mary. 

A circa 1770 watercolor depicting a bird perched on a flowering branch was reportedly influenced by Indian nature paintings, Chinese bird and flower paintings, and European botanical illustrations. (It was also created with geographically corresponding pigments: Indian yellow and indigo, Chinese vermilion, and Prussian blue.) A circa 1825 painting of a breadnut reflects how local edible fruits appealed to company agents.

“We often see in these arts curiosity and wonder at plants and animals overlapping with a market-oriented mind-set,” Peterson tells the Yale Daily News. “Artists who worked in the company’s orbit visually recorded commodities and their processes of manufacturing.”

The exhibition marks the first public display of Lucknow From the Gomti, also known as the Lucknow scroll. Because it’s so large and fragile, only half the piece will be unrolled and displayed at a time, in part to reduce light exposure. Conservators at the museum recently finished a two-year study of the piece.

“The primary conservation challenges stemmed from the scroll’s complex, layered construction,” Anita Dey, the assistant paper conservator at the Yale Center for British Art, tells the Art Newspaper’s Annabel Keenan. “It is composed of multiple sheets of paper joined together with subsequent linings of another paper layer and a cotton-textile backing,” which prevent it from laying flat.

Researchers discovered that multiple artists completed the scroll, although they left no signatures. Four pages of handwritten notes in English accompany the piece, describing the panoramic view of Lucknow. The unknown person who commissioned the scroll may have written them.

“The scroll has a fascinating story both historically and materially, in part because it’s so mysterious,” the exhibition’s curators tell the Art Newspaper.

“Painters, Ports and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850” is on display at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, through June 21, 2026.