ABSTRACT
In the first half of its history, when the East India Company was primarily a mercantile venture, it commissioned numerous artworks. This chapter is structured according to the five early locations the Company used as its headquarters in the City of London between 1600 and 1745. It examines the artworks to elucidate the changing narratives the corporation used to justify its existence and promote its work at key moments of change and disruption. The objects it commissioned in the seventeenth century provide a fascinating backdrop for the more popularly known Company artworks of the early eighteenth century, particularly the paintings, furniture, and sculpture that went into the Directors’ Court Room of Theodor Jacobsen’s East India House. The chapter ends by looking at portraits of the shipwreck survivor John Dean to show how his story belies the hubris of the Company’s other early eighteenth-century artworks.
