• MAKE TEA, NOT WAR: IMAGINING INFORMAL EMPIRE IN WILLIAM DANIELL'S A VIEW IN CHINA

William and Thomas Daniell are best known for their depictions of India. En route to Calcutta in 1785, however, they made a “stopover” in China, producing several sketches and oil paintings of the Chinese landscape. Although the East India Company was beginning to trade with China at the turn of the century, the Qing government continued to exclude foreigners from the Chinese interior. This paper explores the role of the Daniells’ work in imagining Britain’s “informal empire” in China. In presenting China as a land of untapped economic potential, their art expressed a fictive mobility that challenged the reality of physical and political immobility in Anglo-Sino relations.

Apart from a close analysis of the Daniells’ work in the Yale Center of British Art, this paper examines contemporaneous textual sources, such as travel accounts and journal articles that the Daniells might have used to depict the Chinese landscape. The project also compares the Daneill’s portrayal of the Chinese landscape to their approach to the metropolitan and colonial Indian scene, in order to illuminate the distinctive character of the “stopover.” Finally, this paper explores the immediate and long-term circulation and reception of the Daniells’ work at pivotal moments in East-West relations, particularly during the Cold War.

To date, most Sinophile historians of art have focused on Chinese landscape painting, situating themselves within a tradition of patrician orientalism. In examining artistic renderings of China under the British gaze, this project offers a modest contribution to the extant scholarship.