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40  HENRIETTA CLIVE AND ANNA TONELLI 2 FIG 2 Maharaja Sarabhoji of Tanjore with a Minister, late 18th century, Tanjore School, gouache on paper, 67.5 x 57cm, Powis Castle, Powys Photo: © National Trust Images/John Hammond FIG 3 Lady Henrietta Antonia Clive, c. 1788, Anna Tonelli, watercolour on ivory, diam. 8.9cm, Powis Castle, Powys Photo: © National Trust Images/John Hammond FIG 4 The Mate of the ‘Polacre’, 1798, Henrietta Antonia Clive (1786–1835), watercolour on paper, 20 x 21.5cm, Powis Castle, Powys Photo: © National Trust Images/John Hammond countries, particularly near Hyderabad. I should delight in it above all things. It is hard that we poor females are not to get anything in this Asiatic world.3 On 4 March 1800, Henrietta, Lady Clive, née Herbert (1758–1830), wife of Edward, Lord Clive (1754–1839), the East India Company’s governor of Madras, set out on an extraordinary thousand-mile journey around southern India. The tour would last seven months, taking her deep into the recently defeated kingdom of Mysore, through cities, mountains and jungles. Official duties obliged her husband, son of the more famous Robert Clive (1725–74), or ‘Clive of India’, to remain on the coast, so she was accompanied by her two daughters, 13-year-old Henrietta (1786–1835) and 12-year-old Charlotte (1787–1866), along with a vast retinue of bodyguards, servants and animals. ‘Fourteen elephants were employed to carry our tents,’ recorded Charlotte in her journal. ‘We had two camels, which were mostly used for carrying messages, and one hundred bullocks to draw the bandies in which all the rest of our baggage was to be conveyed.’1 By her estimate, when ‘every soul was assembled they amounted to 750 persons!’2 Lady Clive took with her the trappings of an aristocratic female household, including palanquins, a harp, a pianoforte and her one-horse bandy. Along the way, she collected many valuable items, writing to her husband shortly after the start of her trek: If you want collectors or collectoresses I think I should like to extremely … and grab over strange With characteristic irony, Lady Clive applied to herself the reputation for unscrupulous grabbing and getting that employees of the East India Company had built up among their compatriots during its 200-year existence. In reality, her collecting was limited to objects appropriate for the wife of a government appointee in the ostensibly reformed East India Company of the later 18th century. Refusing the gorgeous jewels that were offered to her at the courts she visited, she accepted only gifts of perfume, fine textiles, flowers and the occasional exotic pet for her daughters.4 Portraits seem also to have been deemed free of imputations of corruption so she kept a precious gouache and gold likeness that was presented to her by Maharaja Sarabhoji of Tanjore (1777–1832) (Fig. 2).5 The objects that she more actively pursued reflect her intellectual leanings: beautiful books in Persian and Hindustani, languages that she and her daughters were learning, as well as botanical and mineralogical specimens.6 But perhaps most intriguing of all was a series of drawings made for her by another woman in the party, Signora Anna Tonelli, née Nistri (c. 1763–1846). Tonelli is usually described as governess of Lady Clive’s two daughters during their time in India (1798–1801). Henrietta’s copy of Tonelli’s portrait of Don Demetrio Christofolo, chief mate of a Turkish ship which the Clives’ armed convoy captured on the way to Madras, is a vivid example of her knack for turning unexpected, sometimes perilous, situations into impromptu drawing lessons (Fig. 4). Although she was undoubtedly charged with teaching the girls music, drawing and Italian,7 she seems also to have served as a companion for Lady Clive, who described her as ‘a treasure to me in every way’, praising her singing, which ‘enchants everyone’.8 Her first dealings with the family, in fact, had been in Italy many years earlier in her capacity as a professional portraitist. Tonelli was the daughter of a Florentine miniaturist and had, by 1785, married the violin virtuoso Luigi Tonelli.9 On the return of the Clives from their Grand Tour in 1788, they carried in their luggage 10 pictures by Tonelli, all of them copies of the exquisite pastel portraits they had commissioned in Rome from her teacher, Hugh Douglas Hamilton.10 Several surviving copies of Hamilton’s works, both oils and miniatures, made for the family are attributed to Tonelli, including a small circular likeness of Lady Clive (Fig. 3). The connection between Tonelli and the Clives resumed in 1794, when, having moved to England, she made pastels of their sons, Edward (1785–1848) and Robert (1789–1854) (Figs. 5 & 6). For the next few years, however, she worked as a professional portrait artist and as an Italian teacher for wealthy families in various parts of the British Isles, exhibiting at the Royal Academy in London in 1794 and 1797.11 By the winter of 1796 she was living intermittently with the Clives at Walcot, the family’s Shropshire estate, where the pastels of young Henrietta and Charlotte dated 1797 were probably made (Figs. 7 & 8).12 Even after making the journey to India with the Clives, Tonelli did not abandon her artistic career, targeting the potentially
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HENRIETTA CLIVE AND ANNA TONELLI  41 lucrative colonial portrait market.13 In this she may have been inspired by the experiences of other portraitists in British India, including the miniaturist Diana Hill (c. 1760–1844), who practised in Calcutta, although her efforts seem to have met with more limited commercial success.14 She observed despairingly of her ‘banishment’ in Madras: ‘the fine arts are not at all encouraged, and by few admired, the love of money is the only Idol.’15 x The drawings that Tonelli made for her patroness during their tour of the Indian interior are different in character to the polished likenesses on which she had built her career. Many are topographical views of the landscapes they encountered on their route, from the coastal plains of Madras and the Carnatic, which Lady Clive had so longed to escape, to the rocky peaks of the Eastern Ghats and the lush terrain of the Mysore Plateau beyond. Vignettes of the Clives’ pets and the travelling party at rest also survive, as well as pencil sketches worked up in colour of the individuals they encountered, from Hindu queens and Muslim princes to brightly dressed sepoys and young pages in neat muslin gowns.16 Most of these drawings appear to have been made fairly rapidly, reflecting the contingencies of life on the road (Tonelli preferred to travel by elephant ‘because the very elevated situation in which one is placed on their backs renders the Air infinitely more pure & Fresh’).17 Even the most highly finished examples, such as her drawing of Rajah Sarabhoji, are different from her earlier European portraits, demonstrating a more limited tonal range and a greater focus on the minutiae of jewellery, embroidery and the delicate pleating of fabric (Fig. 1). In several respects, this imagery is typical of the pushand-pull dynamic of British visual culture in India at the close of the 18th century. Landscapes were filtered through the familiarising idiom of the European ‘picturesque’ movement, while emphasising at times the exotic ‘otherness’ of oriental customs. In recent decades, art historians have traced these trends to the East India Company’s transformation from a trading monopoly into a sovereign ruler in that period.18 Produced within the governor’s household, Tonelli’s pictures are intimately connected with the exertion of British power in India. While Lady Clive’s progress through Mysore was certainly motivated by personal factors, its diplomatic and symbolic importance was evident from the beginning. By looking a little more closely at the most elaborate of the drawings from the tour, Tipu Sultan Enthroned (Fig. 9), and the highly political context in which it was created, this essay will touch on some of the ways in which elite women’s artistry and patronage could contribute to the realisation of British rule in India at a crucial stage. Tipu Sultan Enthroned is exceptional among Tonelli’s Indian drawings. Rather than being drawn from a living sitter, it depicts an individual who had died in battle some 15 months before the drawing was made. Tipu Sultan (1750–99), the redoubtable Muslim sultan of Mysore, had dominated the Clives’ experience of India in life and in death. Within months of their arrival in Madras, war had broken out between the British and Tipu, the fourth major conflict between these rival powers in southern India since the 1760s. During the tenure of the overtly 3 imperialistic governor-general Richard Wellesley, Lord Mornington (1760–1842), the elder brother of the future Duke of Wellington, the British had come to find Mysore’s feared but greatly trumped-up alliance with Napoleon increasingly intolerable, especially in the context of their war with France, and had taken its capital, Seringapatam, on 4 May 1799.19 Tipu died defending his city. This war had kept Lady Clive confined to Madras for the first part of her husband’s governorship, but the British victory in 1799 and the nominal restoration of the Hindu Wodeyar dynasty (which Tipu’s father had usurped) made possible her journey to Mysore. Reflecting on the wider significance of these events, which removed one of the last obstacles to British supremacy on the subcontinent, she wrote: 4 It is a very extraordinary event certainly, that five months ago … the army passed the frontiers of Tipu’s country and that within that time, he is dead, his country divided, the lawful sovereign restored and the English position secure for ever in all human probability.20 Tonelli’s drawing depicts Tipu in his pomp. Sitting crosslegged on his throne, he holds an elaborately embellished

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HENRIETTA CLIVE AND ANNA TONELLI  41

lucrative colonial portrait market.13 In this she may have been inspired by the experiences of other portraitists in British India, including the miniaturist Diana Hill (c. 1760–1844), who practised in Calcutta, although her efforts seem to have met with more limited commercial success.14 She observed despairingly of her ‘banishment’ in Madras: ‘the fine arts are not at all encouraged, and by few admired, the love of money is the only Idol.’15

x

The drawings that Tonelli made for her patroness during their tour of the Indian interior are different in character to the polished likenesses on which she had built her career. Many are topographical views of the landscapes they encountered on their route, from the coastal plains of Madras and the Carnatic, which Lady Clive had so longed to escape, to the rocky peaks of the Eastern Ghats and the lush terrain of the Mysore Plateau beyond. Vignettes of the Clives’ pets and the travelling party at rest also survive, as well as pencil sketches worked up in colour of the individuals they encountered, from Hindu queens and Muslim princes to brightly dressed sepoys and young pages in neat muslin gowns.16 Most of these drawings appear to have been made fairly rapidly, reflecting the contingencies of life on the road (Tonelli preferred to travel by elephant ‘because the very elevated situation in which one is placed on their backs renders the Air infinitely more pure & Fresh’).17 Even the most highly finished examples, such as her drawing of Rajah Sarabhoji, are different from her earlier European portraits, demonstrating a more limited tonal range and a greater focus on the minutiae of jewellery, embroidery and the delicate pleating of fabric (Fig. 1).

In several respects, this imagery is typical of the pushand-pull dynamic of British visual culture in India at the close of the 18th century. Landscapes were filtered through the familiarising idiom of the European ‘picturesque’ movement, while emphasising at times the exotic ‘otherness’ of oriental customs. In recent decades, art historians have traced these trends to the East India Company’s transformation from a trading monopoly into a sovereign ruler in that period.18

Produced within the governor’s household, Tonelli’s pictures are intimately connected with the exertion of British power in India. While Lady Clive’s progress through Mysore was certainly motivated by personal factors, its diplomatic and symbolic importance was evident from the beginning. By looking a little more closely at the most elaborate of the drawings from the tour, Tipu Sultan Enthroned (Fig. 9), and the highly political context in which it was created, this essay will touch on some of the ways in which elite women’s artistry and patronage could contribute to the realisation of British rule in India at a crucial stage.

Tipu Sultan Enthroned is exceptional among Tonelli’s Indian drawings. Rather than being drawn from a living sitter, it depicts an individual who had died in battle some 15 months before the drawing was made. Tipu Sultan (1750–99), the redoubtable Muslim sultan of Mysore, had dominated the Clives’ experience of India in life and in death. Within months of their arrival in Madras, war had broken out between the British and Tipu, the fourth major conflict between these rival powers in southern India since the 1760s. During the tenure of the overtly

3

imperialistic governor-general Richard Wellesley, Lord Mornington (1760–1842), the elder brother of the future Duke of Wellington, the British had come to find Mysore’s feared but greatly trumped-up alliance with Napoleon increasingly intolerable, especially in the context of their war with France, and had taken its capital, Seringapatam, on 4 May 1799.19 Tipu died defending his city.

This war had kept Lady Clive confined to Madras for the first part of her husband’s governorship, but the British victory in 1799 and the nominal restoration of the Hindu Wodeyar dynasty (which Tipu’s father had usurped) made possible her journey to Mysore. Reflecting on the wider significance of these events, which removed one of the last obstacles to British supremacy on the subcontinent, she wrote:

4

It is a very extraordinary event certainly, that five months ago … the army passed the frontiers of Tipu’s country and that within that time, he is dead, his country divided, the lawful sovereign restored and the English position secure for ever in all human probability.20

Tonelli’s drawing depicts Tipu in his pomp. Sitting crosslegged on his throne, he holds an elaborately embellished

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