Abstract
The first known American artist to visit India in the early 1880s, Edwin Lord Weeks emerged as a celebrated painter of Indian scenes when most Orientalist painters were inspired by North Africa and the Holy Land. Weeks regularly exhibited his India-themed pictures at the Paris Salon and went on to display an impressive corpus of Indian paintings at the Empire of India Exhibition (1895) in London. In this chapter, I analyze how he engaged with the materiality of royal India at the height of the Victorian Raj when the vogue for Indian exotica had also peaked in America during the Gilded Age. Specifically, I look at how his painted surfaces can be understood as sites of imperial spectacle that were enhanced by new American technologies.
Edwin Lord Weeks, From the Black Sea through Persia and India (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1896), 270.
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Acknowledgement
I thank Dominic Iacono, Laura J. Wellner, Dana M. Garvey, Henry Glassie, Diana Greenwold, Howell Perkins‚ Nida Rehman, and Sylvia Yount for their help at various stages of writing this essay.
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Ray, R. (2017). “A Dazzle of Light”: Edwin Lord Weeks and Royal India. In: Arora, A., Kaur, R. (eds) India in the American Imaginary, 1780s–1880s. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62334-4_9
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