A View in the North Street of Fort St George

Francis Swain Ward, who was a trained landscape artist, joined the East India Company in 1757 as a young lieutenant. It allowed him to travel to India and make several pictures of the rapidly evolving colony, which was under the administration of the company (and not the English Crown) during Ward's lifetime. This work captures the north street of Fort St George, the first English fortress in the subcontinent that had come up a century-and-a-half before Ward painted it. Located in Chennai (then Madras), it can veritably be called the first English settlement that provided the template for all future English settlements in India.