ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the making of an underlying pictorial grammar which so educates its recipients who thereafter associate a scopic territory with the epithet, “British Empire”, occupied, possessed and taken pride in. This empire figures as spectacle, made popular not only in exhibition halls but also on theatre stages and numerous kinds of optical and panoramic shows generating visual delight and thrill. Many in situ art works by East India Company painters in India were used for creating these spectacles for a metropolitan audience. This chapter goes on further to explore the lives and selected art works of George Chinnery and Charles D’Oyly and their influences on one another in order to trace the expansion of the metropolitan gaze to the outskirts and mofussils. The optics and artistic peregrinations subscribe to a strikingly similar trajectory to that of the progress of cartographic gaze which gradually penetrates inwards, unravelling new and still newer spaces for viewing.
