Copying Elites: The British Illustrated Press, Indian Portraiture, and Alienated Labor

This article examines images in mid-nineteenth-century British illustrated newspapers and their practice of copying or borrowing forms, compositions, conventions, and motifs from Indian portraiture. It places portrait art from India and wood-engraved images in newspapers into conversation and presents two arguments: in recycling images from portrait art, newspapers were borrowing styles of visual referencing and replication that were standard practice in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraiture in India; and practices of copying across media and between India and Britain led to the erasure of the large army of both Indians and Britons who did the work of replication or translation.