ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I intend to examine Lady Impey’s collection of bird paintings for which she came to be widely known; the greatest achievement was renaming of the Himalayan monad after her. Situating Lady Impey within the social and cultural context of eighteenth-century Britain and Imperialism, I consider this collection of images as performing a two-fold task;: firstly, bearing testimony to her engagement with both 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 ideologies.
