Johan Zoffany departed for India in 1783, as Paul Sandby noted, where he ‘anticipates to roll in gold dust.’[1] He was given permission to travel by the East India Company in the capacity of a portrait painter and he must have hoped that his success at the Courts of Europe in the previous decades would be replicated in British controlled Calcutta. Indeed, the roll-call of patrons he did attract on arrival suggests that his financial predictions were correct, shortly after arriving, he produced portraits of: Warren Hastings, Elijah Impey, Claude Martin, and Asaf-ud-Daula. Although he established a successful practice amongst Europeans in Calcutta, his most engaging and important work emanated from the time he spent ‘up-country’.



[1] Ed. Martin Postle, Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed, Exh. Cat., New Haven (Yale Center for British Art), 2012, p.38.

 

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