Eleanor Stephenson Receives Research Support Grant

Eleanor Stephenson, PhD student at the University of Cambridge, received a Research Support Grant in 2023; below she details how her grant was spent.

"I received a Research Support Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre to research a private archive and art collection in Scotland, with three generations of East India Company connections. I am currently working on my PhD at the University of Cambridge, which focuses on the colonial connections of the early Royal Society. My interest in art, science and empire began as an undergraduate at the Courtauld, with Professor Zehra Jumabhoy’s brilliant course on the history of South Asian art, and continued during my master’s course with Professor Emily Mann, on architectures of empire. This kickstarted my ongoing research project on the East India Company and Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

The Paul Mellon Centre’s generous support allowed me to undertake three research visits to a private archive and collection in Scotland. This house has a vast archive, spanning almost four hundred years! So, I spent the first two trips wading through boxes – luckily there is a catalogue – to focus my research on one period and person, and my last trip was spent with an excellent Scottish photographer to document some of the manuscripts and artworks. I chose to focus on Captain George Robertson (later Robertson-Aikman) (1760–1844), a very interesting and multifaceted East India Company commander and merchant, trading between South America, Europe, and South and East Asia in the late eighteenth century. When he had spare time on his trips around the world, Captain Robertson produced maps of places not yet surveyed by Europeans, some of which are still used today, and watercolours of landscapes, architecture and people. He also bought paintings, decorative arts and expensive accessories for his wife and daughters.

When he retired from the Company in the early nineteenth century, Captain Robertson turned his attention to his art collecting. He had inherited vast estates in Scotland – many from other Company men in his family, so he had some colonial cash to splash! His interest in art probably stemmed from his family: his grandfather was the famous Scottish portraitist, William Aikman (1682–1731), and his aunt, Anne Forbes (1745–1834), was the first professional woman painter from Scotland. In his London townhouse, 68 Great Portland Street, Captain Robertson displayed Chinese and Japanese decorative arts, paintings by seventeenth-century Dutch masters such as Rembrandt and Rubens, seascapes by Willem van de Velde and Abraham Storck, and portraits by eighteenth-century painters Angelica Kauffman, William Beechey, Thomas Hickey and Joshua Reynolds.

I presented my findings from this research project in April 2024 at the Association for Art History Annual Conference, at the University of Bristol. This research contributed to the understanding of Scotland’s role in the East India Company, and how the colonial fortunes these Scottish Company men made and spent shaped country house architecture, landscape design, art and art collecting, in the British Isles."

Find out more about our Research Support Grant.