Keynote lecture: Art/Music—India/Britain,1886-1914

Event details

This paper examines the relationship between Britain and India in the late Victorian and Edwardian years, as manifested in both art and music. In doing so it juxtapose two distinct phenomena: vision and sound. Where these two met, in an intermedial space, the British Empire achieved its most extravagant effects, often in explicit homage to its Mughal predecessors. But the meeting of art and music, the paper also proposes, also harbored revolutionary portents of the end of empire. The paper opens with the official face of the empire at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition and the Delhi Durbars of 1903 and 1911; secondly, it considers the poetic, visual and musical evocation of Mughal India as an imagined space of sexual and aesthetic pleasure in works created by white colonial women Adela Nicholson and Amy Woodforde-Finden; and a final section looks at what E.M. Forster called the “India Boom,” of 1910 when leading creative figures came to find in India’s arts and crafts a persuasive alternative to the globally rapacious culture of industrial capitalism.

About the speaker

Professor Tim Barringer

Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He has published widely on the art of Britain and its empire and on American landscape painting. He has co-curated many international loan exhibitions including American Sublime, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde and Victorian Radicals. His writings on art and music have appeared in Art History and in edited collections including British Music and Modernism, 1895-1960, The Edwardian Sense and Vaughan Williams in Context.