Windows to a Time: Two Portraits of a Lady and Her Household in Colonial Calcutta

Abstract This paper focuses on two contemporaneous portraits of Mary, Lady Impey, who is well‐known as patron of eighteenth‐century natural history paintings. One ‘Company painting’ by Zayn al‐Din portrays her with servants, and another oil painting by Johan Zoffany depicts Mary Impey with her family. Through examination of the patron and her surroundings, as well as the servants and children in the two portraits and other related examples, I suggest that the portraits reflect the interactions and relationships between patron and artists. In addition, while the paintings were produced through encounters between Indian and European artists, through which they adopted unfamiliar idioms, their meanings were later forcefully changed due to the shift within the values and objectives of eighteenth‐century English society.