People of Clay: Portrait Objects in the Peabody Essex Museum

Abstract

This article focuses on the nineteenth century clay figures from India housed at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, USA. In considering the commission and collecting of these clay figures as tangible by-products of the Indo-American relationship between traders in the 19th century, I look at three distinct categories within portrait-objects: life-size clay representations of two mendicant figures; three Calcutta merchants given as gifts; and a set of miniature clay dolls representing various Indian social types. Accounting for various European and American presences in nineteenth century India and acknowledging asymmetrical power relations in such encounters, I home in on iconographical and technological choices made by the Krishnagar craftsmen to point to the juxtaposition of the local and the adopted. This adoption, I suggest, is not a straightforward one but a moment in a series of moments of transaction among different cultural subjects. Extending these relations to a climate of variable artistic patronage, I problematise the relationship between artistic agency and portraiture, arguing that it is the act of commission and exchange within this space of cultural encounter in colonial India and the museum that determines to what extent a figure is, or is not, considered a portrait.