ABSTRACT
The increasing power and influence of the East India Company in the subcontinent of South Asia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought a desire to map and itemise the topography, flora, fauna, geology and peoples of the area and to extend this process into the Himalayas and beyond. Had Davis reached Tibet, his fame would have been assured, for it would have given him the accolade of being the first British picturesque painter to work beyond the Himalayas. The hearth, decorated with Buddhist auspicious symbols, is the centre point of an elaborate hierarchy of social space determining the status of family members or visitors by their degrees of distance from it. Ladakhi Buddhists is suggested in his cross-section of the temple next to King Delden Namgyal's 17th century palace at Shey. It is this ability to reveal internal and indigenous ways of seeing, making and acting within Ladakhi spaces that give Powell's work its distinctiveness.
