fig. 9 Johan Zoffany, Group Portrait with Sir Elijah and Lady Impey (c.1783-4) oil on canvas, 91.5 x 122 cm, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
fig. 10 James Gillray (printmaker), A Sale of English Beauties in the East Indies (1786), published by William Holland, London, etching and aquatint, 41.7 x 53.0 cm, British Museum, London
Now I would like to compare this image with another of a European female posed in the attitude of an Indian dancer in a context of judgment by patriarchal figures.
This image (fig. 10) shows a European woman being auctioned on the docks at Calcutta and was made in 1786. It was copied directly by Rowlandson 25 years later in 1811 (not illustrated). The satirical print shows a woman posed in the attitude of a nautch girl and inspected by two Indian babus who look more like the rotund Turks which populate Rowlandson’s erotic images of harems. In the caricatures of both Gillray and Rowlandson an excess of flesh frequently stands in for a gluttony of desire fattened on profit reaped from an unequal social economy. Other women are discarded as unwanted goods, another is weighed on a scale with raw cash, the black boy at the centre of the image links this Anglo-Indian auction of commodities to the circum-Atlantic trade in slaves and the soldiers among the crowd consolidate this as a representation of sex, war and dancing.