Tag: Black representation in art

By Roxanne Gleave and Audrey Dewjee

Why ‘GEMS’?

On one of the Zoom events we attended during 2021 someone pointed out that, globally, white people are in a minority and that it is non-white people who form the global ethnic majority (GEM). We have got so used to (and become conditioned into) talking in terms of the ‘ethnic minority’ or, possibly, ‘black and minority ethnic’, that it is easy to forget the global context. We liked the idea and in this article we are going to unashamedly use ‘GEM’ as a reminder of this global reality.

GEMS in art

Awareness that there has been a black presence in Britain since at least Roman times has been growing gradually but, if we are challenged, what evidence can we produce?

Audrey Dewjee’s research into the early black presence in north Wales is documented in an article on this site ^[1]https://www.historycalroots.com/discovering-black-history-in-wales/, whilst for his many articles for us, John Ellis has drawn together records from a number of sources to identify the black presence in the Royal Navy and British Army in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.^[2]If you type ‘ellis’ into this site’s ‘search’ box John’s articles will come up

Another way, of course, is to diligently trawl through parish records as people like Kathleen Chater have done ^[3]Untold Histories – Black people in England and Wales during the period of the British slave trade, c.1660-1807, Kathleen Chater, Manchester University Press, 2011. Kathleen is an outstanding example, there are numerous others who have adopted the same approach to identify examples of an early black presence in Britain.

The authors of this article have long been in the habit when going round museums and art galleries of looking for evidence of a black presence. It can be a dispiriting experience as, often, wall after wall is filled with portraits of white people or group scenes with no black representation at all. But there are examples to be spotted.

This article is about GEMS in art and offers just a few examples of black people being depicted in art. We are not art historians, our aim is simply to show that black people have been present in Britain for centuries and that, sometimes, that presence was captured in the art of the day.

Who? What? Where? When?

Having scoured the gallery and finally identified the portrayal of a black person, in many cases, there is an immediate sense of frustration because they are, often but not always, not the main character in the scene; they are in the shadows, at the edges of the frame and, hence, anonymous. So, we may not know who they are, we cannot (with some exceptions) talk about them as personalities, but their mere presence, the fact they are there at all, depicted in a painting, is evidence of a black presence in the society they inhabited.

We may not know their names but we can deduce something about what they did from the role they are depicted in. Many are very obviously servants, literally subservient and therefore reliant on the whim of their employer; but it is worth remembering that the life of a servant could be relatively secure compared to other working class people who might live their lives in, or on the brink of, destitution. But there are others in roles such as: groom, looking after horses, trumpeter in a grand pageant, or military personnel either in the Army or the Royal Navy. They are depicted in these roles because these are the roles performed by black people in society at large. We don’t need to simply assume this, it is something that we can confirm from documentary evidence.

Paintings can also tell us about where black people lived and can give the lie to the common misconception that black people were only present in cities or large towns. There are pictures, for instance, of black grooms attending their master’s horses on the great country estates. Black men (it was usually men) who lived on a country estate would have played their part in the life of the local community, for instance by attending church, and possibly marrying a local woman and establishing a family.

Finally, the dates of paintings tell us when there was a black presence. The earliest example we will use in this article dates from the 16^th century.

The sixteenth century

In her book, Black Tudors,^[4]’Black Tudors – the untold story’, Miranda Kaufmann, Oneworld Publication, 2017 Miranda Kauffmann identifies dozens of people described as ‘moors’ or ‘blackamoors’ during Tudor times, she writes ‘In 1560, Sir John Young of Bristol had an African gardener, as did Sir Henry Bromley of Holt, Worcestershire, in 1607 … Grace Robinson, a blackamoor, worked as a laundress alongside John Morockoe, a blackamoor, in the kitchen and scullery for Richard Sackville, the third Earl of Dorset, at Knole in Kent between 1613 and 1624.’^[5]ibid p.102 One of these ‘black Tudors’, John Blanke, is depicted in a painting.

It is a pictorial illuminated manuscript, a continuous roll approximately 60 feet long. It is a narrative of the beginning, middle and end of the tournament, which took place over two days.

One of the trumpeters is clearly black and researchers have been able to identify him as John Blanke as there are various documents that refer to him (including a request from him to the King for a pay rise, which was successful).^[6]https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/john-blanke/#gs.kq502w

The seventeenth century

This painting from about 1650 was in the news as we were writing this article. Described as ‘recently discovered’ it had been sold at auction to an overseas buyer. The British Government stepped in to temporarily delay its export in the hope that a British gallery would come forward and buy it because of the highly unusual subject matter.

‘Although not distinguished artistically’ it is described as ‘a great rarity in British art, as a mid-seventeenth-century work that depicts a black woman and a white woman with equal status.’^[7]https://hyperallergic.com/699732/uk-bans-export-rare-painting-featuring-black-and-white-woman/ The presence of a black woman is intriguing, why would the anonymous artist have included her if women like her did not live around him? The figures do not look like caricatures to us, someone sat for the artist while he (or she) went about their work.

something that is often forgotten: Black and Asian people lived in the countryside as well as in big towns. Over the years they were employed in all sorts of capacities – such as grooms, coachmen, gardeners, huntsmen and farm workers. For example, there was a newspaper report in 1768 which said that ‘on Saturday afternoon, a Negro servant who was harrowing with three horses in a field at Beckenham was killed by lightning, as were also two of the horses.’ For anyone who doesn’t know, harrowing is done after ploughing to break up and smooth the surface of the soil, prior to planting.

Lely painted many portraits for Charles II, often of his numerous mistresses. However, this is Charlotte Fitzroy, his daughter by Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland. It shows her with a young Indian pageboy who seems to be about the same age. Indian servants were not as common as African, but there were certainly a number of them around after 1600 when the East India Company was founded. Some rich people who wanted to be slightly different than the rest managed to acquire Chinese servants and you can occasionally come across pictures of them too.

Only the very rich could afford to have their portraits painted, so most servants have left no visual record of their existence. This portrait from 1682 by Pierre Mignard is of Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, one of Charles II’s many mistresses. According to the National Portrait Gallery, the little girl ‘is shown presenting precious coral, pearls and shell to the duchess to emphasise her wealth and position. The child’s dark skin also emphasises the whiteness of the duchess’s complexion.’^[9]https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp03623/louise-de-keroualle-duchess-of-portsmouth

The eighteenth century  

Goodwood was already famous for horse racing at the time this picture was created and the scene shows that at least one of the grooms employed at Goodwood was of African descent. According to the Goodwood website, the black servant holding the Arab horse, may either be Thomas Robinson, who came to Goodwood in the 1740s and was named after the Governor of Barbados, or a footman named Jean Baptiste, who came from one of the French colonies.

Cugoano actually went further than Equiano in arguing for the complete abolition of slavery, by his reckoning ‘every man in Great Britain [is] responsible in some degree, for the shocking and inhuman murders and oppressions of Africans.’^[12] ‘Thoughts and sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species’ , published in 1787

Much of the history we were taught in school was about white men, generally white men of a particular class (people like Lord Mansfield). Dido stands out because she was a black woman whose mother had been enslaved, thus in this painting she defies the three things that rendered so many people like her invisible, race, class and gender.

Some black women left their mark by writing about their lives, people like Mary Prince. Dido didn’t leave us a written legacy, instead we have this portrait of her dating from 1779 and, thanks to the brilliant work of a number of researchers, we know quite a lot about her life (helping us answer the ‘who?’ question). There are a number of articles about Dido on this site but if you want to learn about her you really should visit the All Things Georgian website.^[14]The latest in a series of articles about Dido on All Things Georgian can be found here:https://georgianera.wordpress.com/2022/01/03/dido-elizabeth-belle-ranelagh-street-pimlico/

In art as in life, someone’s status as a GEM will not always be readily apparent. This painting, dating from 1798, depicts Nancy Graham.

Perhaps she doesn’t look like a GEM but we picked up her story from David Alston’s excellent book ‘Slaves and Highlanders’^[15]’Slaves and Highlanders’, David Alston, Edinburgh University Press, 2021 ‘Nancy was the illegitimate daughter of Francis Graham and Miss Jackson, a ‘free coloured’ woman in Jamaica …. Nancy arrived in Scotland as a young girl and had her portrait painted by the fashionable society artist, Henry Raeburn.’^[16]https://www.wikiart.org/en/henry-raeburn/little-girl-holding-flowers-portrait-of-nancy-graham So, the girl in the painting may not look like a GEM but there is clear documentary proof that she had one black grandparent. 

The nineteenth century

As you can see above, their presence at Trafalgar was reflected in the art of the day, a black sailor is shown at the thick of the action in this painting depicting the death of Nelson.^[17]The Death of Nelson, painting by Samuel Drummond, Oil on canvas. H 133 X W 160 cm. The Nelson Museum, Yarmouth.https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-death-of-nelson-351

Some paintings are more mysterious than others. Nothing is known about Isabella Paula, other than her name and that she was in York in 1834 where her portrait was painted by a famous local artist, Mary Ellen Best. It was captioned, “Isabella Paula, a Portuguese Hindoo, 1834”. It is thought that perhaps she may have been connected with a circus or travelling fair.

What does the term “Portuguese Hindoo” refer to?  Perhaps Isabella came from Goa – which was a Portuguese “overseas territory” until 1961.  Maybe she was of mixed Indian and Portuguese ancestry.  The Portuguese had settled and traded in India long before the British arrived and, just like the early British settlers, they intermarried with local women and created a large Eurasian population.

Note the beautiful patterns on Isabella Paula’s clothes.  Indian motifs like these were copied by British textile firms, especially those on the edge of her shawl and on her skirt.  This design eventually became known as “Paisley Pattern,” after the town in Scotland that mass produced it. Shawls originated in India and were introduced to Britain in the 1760s. Initially shawls were only worn by the upper classes, as they were imported from India and very expensive. However, from about 1800 to 1870 they were in daily use all over Britain. Some were patterned, some were plain but every woman wore them, rich and poor.

We will finish with this painting of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor as a boy in 1881.  Samuel went on to become one of the best known and most popular composers of classical music in the closing years of the nineteenth century and earliest decades on the twentieth.

Conclusion

The people in these paintings are not made up from artists’ imaginations. In a number of cases they are portrayals of named individuals and, where that is not the case, it is clear that they are based on black people that the artists would have seen around them, their features are individualised not mere ‘caricatures’. These are just examples, chosen to illustrate our point that paintings are a valuable source of social history in general terms but, more specifically, can be used to illustrate the centuries-long black presence in Britain. We hope that you will seek out such representations when you next visit a museum or gallery and would love to hear about your ‘discoveries’.