2016/07/22 by Sean Willcock · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Art and Culture Studies #Photography and Visual Culture
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/1467-8365.12233
openalex publication_date 2016/07/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
For one critic, the work 'suffers terribly from its discordancy with everything in the exhibition, while it ruins the effects of every other picture, not only in its vicinity, but while the glare of its colouring haunts the vitiated eye.' ii It seemed to launch an aggressive ocular assault against the show's visitors: 'its high colour shrieks at us in other rooms,' leaving 'the eye dazzled and the sense confounded.' iii This article argues that the tumultuous chromatics of Prinsep's The Imperial Assemblage held at Delhi, 1 st January 1877 registered as a crisis of imperial governance for Victorian viewers, disrupting the sober visual strategies that had emerged in British portraiture to secure social cohesion. A similar interpretation of the unruly significance of Prinsep's aesthetic failure at the Royal Academy was offered by a contemporary American critic, who mused on whether the garishness of the artist's painting was actually a form of Indian retribution against the British for the subcontinent being coerced into financing the production of this work as a 'gift' for the new empress. 'Is it possible,' asked the New York Times, 'that the inhabitants of India resented this political move, and have begun their stealthy revenge upon England's Queen by undermining her health with this terrible picture?' iv The political antagonisms of the Raj were thus posited, albeit jestingly, as the cause of an injurious visual disharmony in Prinsep's work. Droll criticism aside, there was a sense in contemporary British aesthetic discourse that the (dis)unity of a polity could be expressed through the formal properties of the arts. In a recent book on Victorian political imagery, Janice Carlisle has shown how political discourse was often influenced by aesthetic concepts, v and that, for famous art critics like John Ruskin, aesthetic properties were imbued with political resonances, with composition being 'an exhibition, in order of the notes, or colours, or forms, of the advantage of perfect fellowship, discipline, and contentment.' vi It follows, then, that compositional disorder could imply political disorder, and I suggest that the disorientating colour scheme of Prinsep's 'kaleidoscopic combinations' should indeed be read in such terms. vii The painting's unwieldy grouping of ruling-class figures represented a wider, entangled set of political and aesthetic problematics in British India. It inadvertently signalled the acute antagonisms inherent to the aestheticised power structures of the late-Victorian Raj, gesturing towards the very social fissures that the elaborately controlled spectacle of the Imperial Assemblage had sought to overlay. Numerous historians have assessed the significance of the Imperial Assemblage and the 'ornamentalist,' viii 'ritualised,' ix and 'participatory' x methods of spectacular colonial governance that it instantiated. The 1877 event was the first of three grand 'durbars' that married aspects of Mughal Indian ceremony with