A Memsahib's Natural World: Lady Mary Impey's Collection of Natural History Paintings

In 1773, twenty-four year old Lady Mary Impey set sail for India with her husband, Sir Elijah Impey, the newly appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Judicature in Calcutta.  Particularly keen on the natural environment, she established a menagerie in Calcutta, and starting from 1773, she commissioned Indian artists, namely Shaikh Zain ud-din, Ram Das and Bhawani Das to paint the birds and animals in her collection. Originally trained in the Mughal style of painting, these artists skillfully negotiated Indian aesthetic standards with western techniques and conventions of natural history painting. Lady Impey's extensive documentation of the behavior and habitat of those species of animals and birds made the later biologists acknowledge her authority as a natural historian.   In this paper, I examine Lady Impey's collection of paintings of birds housed at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Situating Lady Impey within the social and cultural context of eighteenth-century Britain and imperialism, I consider these images as performing a two-fold task: firstly, bearing testimony to her rendezvous both with Indian artists and India's natural world, thereby facilitating the assimilation of exoticism into late eighteenth-century feminine domesticity; and secondly, constructing a discursive and epistemological narrative in which colonial nature came to be deployed in the service of imperial power and ideology. These images are viewed here as constituting rather than simply recording political reality, and the results give crucial insights into the British empire as a cultural regime.