Portrait of an Unknown Man with an Attendant

After being shipwrecked off the Pelew Islands, east of the Philippines, the portraitist Arthur William Devis (son of the painter Arthur Devis) traveled via Macao to Calcutta, arriving in 1784. He remained in India for eleven years, where he painted portraits of British colonists such as this. The identity of this sitter smoking a hookah is unknown, but his languid posture marks a shift in the way British patrons were willing to be represented in small-scale portraits. Devis’s father had shown his sitters as embodiments of polite consumption, affluent and refined but not luxurious (an example is shown nearby). His son, however, portrays this sitter as an indolent colonial master, leisured and sedentary because of the diligent Indian servant on hand to attend to his every need. The servant is so deferential that he does not even look directly at his master.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016