Black British History Extract 3

Representations of Blacks in British Art from the 17th - 20th Century

The Slave Trade evidences the presence of black people in Europe as far back as 1505 with a large influx of black people of between 140,000 – 170,000 arriving on slave ships from the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ at this time. With Britain being one of the major traders in this lucrative area, it would ensure the presence of black people in Britain would have a long history stretching back hundreds of years. From this time onwards the appearance of black people in European painting ranging from Renaissance works by artists such as Jan Gosseart to works by English artists such as Joshua Reynolds ensured an increasing proliferation and familiarisation of black images in art. 

By the mid 18th century Britain was at the height of its powers and wealth, profiting from its leading role in the lucrative slave trade. The ever-growing art market in Britain from the turn of the 19th century through to the end of this period ran concurrently and was fed by the profits of this trade. During this time black people found themselves represented in a variety of guises ranging from caricature to heroic, historic to fictional and from anti-slavery to the exotic. It is clear that in the realm of artists models blacks were still as popular as they were in the days of the great German engraver and painter Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528); who used blacks as models in the 16th century. Then, as in the 17th century, blacks frequently appeared as servants, attendants or extras in crowd scenes, rarely occupying any positions of importance or even being named. This tendency to leave black characters anonymous, thus de-humanising them, proliferated in art to such an extent that there are still many extant pictures without identities for the black people in them. This was compounded by the fact that in most of these representations, black people had little or no control over how they were portrayed. There were of course some notable exceptions to this rule particularly in the 19th century, including the composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor (1875-1912), Prince Alamayou of Abyssinia (1861-79), photographed in 1868, the actor Ira Aldridge (1807-67), and Crimean war heroine Mary Seacole (1805-81), whose fame was such that they were depicted as themselves. 

In such portraits the sitters were afforded a measure of majesty and dignity that suggested some degree of respect and recognition of them as fellow human beings, although in some cases the identity of the sitters and the attribution to the artist has, in recent times, been called into question. Notable examples such as the study of a black man painted by Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) around 1770 display such human qualities. This picture may be a portrait of one of Reynolds’s own black servants or perhaps a portrait of Francis Barber the Jamaican companion of Samuel Johnson the writer. In this unfinished portrait Reynolds makes no attempt to europeanise the physiognomy of the sitter. Rather than depict him in exotic or classical clothes, that would mark him out from the white Europeans, he is dressed in the garments of the day and has a defiant and proud look about his countenance. There is also the example of the painting called Portrait of a Negro Man, Olaudah Equiano. Olaudah Equiano at this time was the richest black man in Britain and a best selling author whose work is still in print to this day. As the title suggests, it is unclear not only whether this is a portrait of Olaudah, but also when it was painted, (1780’s?) and its previous attribution to Reynolds is now also in question.

So what is behind this need to associate one self with the acquisition of black people? To know the answer we need to go back still further to the 13th century and the rule of Frederick II the last of the great Holy Roman Emperors (d.1250). Frederick astonished his contemporaries because he was more like an oriental despot than a European king. He kept a menagerie of animals the likes of which had never before been seen in this part of Europe, such as elephants, tigers and so on - “In his brilliant court at Palermo he kept a harem, guarded by black eunuchs”. Indeed there was an abundant presence of black people at Frederick II’s court. 

This kind of collecting was the perfect way to demonstrate the far-reaching powers and influence of Frederick II, while also demonstrating his wealth, because at this time in Europe most people had little knowledge of these mysterious parts of the world whence these animals and strange ‘animal-like people’ had originated from. Stories of strange lands and exotic creatures had been hinted at in Greek Myth with such animals often accompanying Bacchus’s entourage; demonstrating that this Greek god of wine had knowledge of the exotic lands and their peoples and by implication dominion over them. Moreover, it had been widely believed since ancient times that the human personality could be fathomed simply by comparisons in facial construction, indeed one of the most popular codified versions of this theory was published by Giovanni Battista della Porta in 1586 (De Humana Physiognomonia). It is in these ideas, permeating throughout Western European history that we can trace the origin and invention of exoticism and the co-opting of black people into this role that even to this day still has resonances. 

With this knowledge we can see how, for example, in paintings such as Scene IV, The Toilette from Marriage à la mode series, c.1743 by William Hogarth (1697-1764), the black servant in the centre of the picture contributes to the prevailing attitude of white supremacy and dominance, while the black person on the floor conforms to the notion of being an exotic animal owned by the self-appointed civilised white people. By the 18th century these pseudo-scientific ideas regarding how black people should be seen by white Europeans were given ever more credence by writings such as the 1775 publication of Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beforderung der Menschenkenntnib und Menschenliebe by the Swiss pastor, Johann Casper Lavater. In his book Lavater not only looked at facial features, but also the mathematical angles of faces, and by his 4th volume he started to look at skin types. In one of his observations he describes an African man as being of ‘bowed aspect in the outline of his face the breadth of his eyes; the flatness of the nose; especially the great swollen expansive, tough lips; removed from all fineness and grace…’ To further consolidate these thoughts, Lavater believed and published, that a prominent nose indicated intelligence and a flat one stupidity. This timely publication cannot have failed to have an impact on Joshua Reynolds but not in a way that one might expect. When the Polynesian Omai arrived in England (14th July 1774) it was thought that this strange creature would provide the perfect opportunity for so-called ‘civilised Europeans’ to ‘scientifically’ study this ‘specimen’ to ascertain how he would relate and interact with white Europeans. 

However, this experiment did not go quite the way the British had expected, because by the time of his arrival Omai not only had a rudimentary working knowledge of English, but despite what his English carers thought, he also turned out to be very sophisticated in his manners, knowing exactly how to behave in ‘polite society’. His fame duly spread to the point he was granted an audience with George III. At this audience he chose to wear a brown velvet coat with white waistcoat and grey satin breeches. Omai had clearly not conformed to the expectation of his English audience, so when it came to painting him, Reynolds could not represent such a sophisticated person mimetically with the attributes of so-called stupidity as described by Lavater. As Reynolds said in his 4th Discourse 'it is very difficult to ennoble the character but at the expense of the likeness, which is what is generally required by such as sit to the painter'. The result was a compromise between the European invention of the exotic and European notion of classical nobility. Reynolds dresses Omai in a toga, europeanises his features, but prominently retains Omai’s tattoos. Throughout the 18th century the slave trade in Britain and America continued and the proliferation of images of black people in art continued, but voices of opposition to this inhuman trade in people were beginning to intensify. One of those notable in his opposition was at the time Britain's most celebrated lawyer and also at the forefront of an influential group that were opposed to slavery. 

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield was at the centre of the landmark ruling of 1772 in which the runaway slave James Somerset was set free. But Lord Mansfield had his own personal reasons for supporting James Somerset, as his own great-niece, Dido Elizabeth (Belle) Lindsey was a black woman. Dido is famously captured in a double portrait, (attributed to Johann Zoffany, 1725-1810) hand-in-hand with her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray in the grounds of Kenwood House. Yet even in this image associated with one of the leading abolitionists, care is taken to depict Dido as distinct and ‘other’ by giving her a supposedly exotic headdress. Despite the protestations against slavery and the popularity of Josiah Wedgwood’s (another leading abolitionist) image of the pleading black slave, with the motto: Am I not a Man and a Brother? (1787), slavery’s eventual abolition in the British Empire did not come until 1833, some 40 years after the death of William Mansfield. 

The 19th century also saw the co-opting of black images into art for reasons of giving further credence to white European beliefs in phrenology. This new invention was nothing more than a re-working of Lavater’s 1775 theory regarding ‘racial types’. This theory claimed to be able to categorise people into lower, criminal and upper classes purely based on their physiognomy. Predictably black people fell easily in to the latter categories and paintings such as William Powell Frith’s (1819-1909) Derby Day further propounded these theories by including black people among the ‘criminal classes’. In fact the previous century saw the introduction in 1723 of the 'Black Act’, which actually prohibited the common crime of people who would 'black up' their faces to commit crimes. Indeed, so firmly did these theories resonate with the general feeling of the day that a rail had to be put around Frith’s picture to keep the crowds back when it was first exhibited in 1858. While paintings such as The Beloved (`The Bride'), 1865-6 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) served only to reinforce notions that beauty could only be found in a white complexion and physiognomy by using the black person in the picture as a supposed comparison or contrast. 

Yet throughout these aforementioned periods there is one missing factor in the depiction of black people, the presence of black artists. Although by 1772 there were around 15,000 black people living in London, and recent research shows that black people were also living in other cities and areas such as Liverpool Edinburgh and Kent by the 19th century at least, the one thing that all the surviving images of black people in Britain have in common is that they were all painted by white artists. There is evidence that black artist such as Robert Douglas (1809-87) and Robert Scott Duncanson (1817-72) visited London from America in the 19th century, but none of their works have surfaced. So it must be said that the picture that we have up to this point of black people in Britain, their experiences and what they may have been like as people is tainted by a Eurocentric perspective and thus cannot be anything but historically inaccurate.

It would not be until as late as the 20th century that black people would become established in their own right as artists in Britain. They would depict black people from quite a different perspective than artists of the previous centuries. These images would reveal for perhaps the first time the experiences of these real people, what they felt, what they thought and how they themselves felt white Europeans treated them. It is in this era that we would see black British artists explore issues never before understood by white Europeans. Issues such as race, ethnicity and the contemporary urban experience of black people would be explored by artists such as Sonia Boyce (b.1962). Her work executed in a variety of media includes works such as She Ain't Holding Them Up, She's Holding On, and From Tarzan to Rambo in which Boyce asks questions about the representation of race, colour and the legacy of centuries of cultural stereotyping of black people. Donald Rodney (1961-1998) would look at black masculinity and the self, asking questions regarding the stereotyping in contemporary culture of the young black man as 'public enemy' and the very embodiment of danger. 

Some artists would explore the representation of the black image in art by using their own image in their work, such as Maud Sulter’s (b.1960) self-portrait photograph of the artist as Calliope, which formed part of a series of portraits of the nine muses of Greek mythology. The casting of black women in these roles made the viewer question the previously accepted conviction that such roles in Western European art were solely the reserve of white Europeans. While Rita Keegan (b.1949) would re-cast herself with her self-portrait homage to the Mexican artist Frieda Khalo (1907-1954) and Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen (b.1969) would re-cast the image of the black person in visual art with his own cameo inclusion in his video installations.

All this is a far cry from the majority of staged depictions of black people throughout the previous centuries that often made no connection with them as people leading real lives. indeed the artist Andrew Jefferson-Miles (b.1972) looks back to the early pioneers of black British art, such as Aubrey Williams (1926-1990) and Frank Bowling (b.1936), for his inspiration. In his exhibition of 2000 called In Odd Corners this Century: an Artist’s 20th century in 14 pictures Andrew Jefferson-Miles looked at his ‘natal continent’, South America and his ‘natal country’, Guyana where both Williams and Bowling were born. Jefferson-Miles gives the viewer representations of human suffrage working in a ‘cross-civilizationry dimension’ rather than from an exclusively European perspective. 

Yet far from turning its back on old European traditions of black representation, British artists such as Turner Prize winner, Chris Ofili (b.1968) have embraced some of its more positive and sublime aspects. Re-inventing the old historical roots of painting, Ofili invokes religious iconography and creates a look of jewel-like encrustations in his work, while also looking at themes of black identity and culture. Ofili’s Upper Room display, exhibited at Tate Britian, 2005-6, is an arrangement of twelve canvases, supported on his now famous trademark elephant dung. They flank a larger thirteenth canvas in a specially designed chapel-like environment, which immediately suggests Christ and his twelve Apostles. Such a dilberatly designed environment could also be said to have some distant relationship with the possibly diliberatly design environment of the Arena Chapel in Padua housing Giotto’s famous frescoes, decorated between 1303-05. The repeated image of a rhesus macaque monkey in Ofili’s pictures raises questions of civilisation, nature, the religious and the secular, again from a world-centric perspective rather than a miopic European one. 

It is these artists, working in Britain from the early 20th century to the present that would re-dress the centuries old imbalance of the black image in art, and it is these artists who would in turn be finally recognised and eventually acknowledged for their contribution to the story of art and the truthful historical representation of black people in British art.