This is the story of The East offering her Riches to Britannia, a painting commissioned by the 24 Directors of the East India Company.
In 1778, the directors of the East India Company installed an extravagant new painting in their London headquarters, East India House. Like much corporate art before and since, the quality of the painting was generally regarded as poor, with one commentator describing it as ‘a work too feeble to confer any credit either on the artist or his employers’. But the...
