Allan Appel Photo
Even with her art history degree from Vassar, Lynn Scott, visiting from Florida, did not immediately notice the collar and lock on the neck of the exotically dressed black slave. He stands alarmed, or attentive, or both, at the bottom right of this group portrait of a certain successful merchant of long ago named Elihu Yale and his aristocratic friends.
When she did notice, she exclaimed, “Americans tend to think of slavery as not part of the New England experience. It’s something we don’t think about.”
Now she does.
Which is precisely the point of the small yet quietly disturbing and powerful show Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain, at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA).
The premise is to try to give voice to the voiceless and nameless — especially the almost always unidentified slave figures in portraits and other media from the era of the transatlantic slave trade, which fueled British colonial expansion first in the New World and then in India, with the British East India Company. There Elihu Yale, whose dad David was a founding settler of New Haven, got his start, made his mark, and accumulated enough wealth in madras and other textiles to become the founding benefactor of Yale University.
So it’s fitting that visitors to the show encounter, as soon as they enter the gallery, the bewigged Yale, the Duke of Cavendish and the young nameless black servant at the bottom right.
“They duded him up to make him look like them,” Scott said, as she pointed to the day coat and the finery, which echo the gentlemen; the headgear on the servant indicates a place of exotic origin, perhaps India, where Yale made his fortune.
“A Young Girl with an Enslaved Servant and a Dog,” by Bartholomew Dandridge, oil on canvas, 1725.
The collar definitely indicates the enslaved, as it does in several other portraits in the first section of the show, including this one by Bartholomew Dandridge (pictured), with a collared dog paired with slave in a shared show of exaggerated fealty.
In Elihu Yale’s time, great sailing ships comprised an 18th-century maritime internet. They crisscrossed the seas carrying cargoes of personal letters, bills of sale, and other communications, along with sugar, tobacco, and the human capital that may have been the indispensable element in the growth of the British empire.
The exhibition has been long in the making, said Linda Friedlander, YCBA’s senior curator of education (shown beside the large Yale portrait).
“Charles Stanhope, third Early of Harrington, and a Servant,” oil on canvas, 1782.
“‘Who is he? And why are there so few people in this museum [both on the walls and walking through the galleries who look] like me?’” Friedlander paraphrased the inquiries of African-American visitors, including many school group kids over the years. They asked that question when they stood in front of a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds (only a detail of the monumental work is shown), which is part of the show but has been on the wall for decades in the permanent collection.
“That was the beginning of the dialogue” that led to the exhibition, Friedlander added.
“All the stuff [in the Yale portrait] on the table — tobacco from the [North American] colonies, diamonds from India, silver from all over, Madeira wine, the Caribbean” — all speak of the byways of the slave trade, she said.
Many of the pictures reward close viewing for telling details, even though, as the center’s materials say, the images and juxtapositions draw on “long-established European visual traditions in which black servants are depicted as subordinate to white masters.”
A Battle of the Collars
Once the young servant’s collar is pointed out, you can’t help but look, for example, at the long, white, elaborate collars of the gentlemen. The group portrait can be viewed as a battle of collars. The slave’s collar is clear in its meaning. A close viewing reveals that it has a tiny lock. What kind of lock do the gentlemen’s long and ostentatious collars exercise on them?
Then, check out the expression on the the young slave’s face. The museum’s materials as well as its online interactive expert commentary do not address his animation, intelligence, and — to my eye — the presence of an agenda in his eyes. Unlike other portraits in the exhibition, that expression doesn’t suggest fealty. What does it suggest?
And look at the hand of the gentleman nearest the slave. There’s a sense of movement toward his sword, which is clearly in sight. Has the servant made a grab for it? Would the slave owners’ constant fear of a revolt — and of being murdered in their beds— have caused an almost automatic reaction in an aristocrat when any slave came too close to a weapon?
Detail from “Plan and Sections of a slave Ship,” from Carl Bernhard Wadstrom’s “An Essay on colonization Particularly Applied to the Western Coast of Africa,” line engraving with aquatint, 1794.
The paintings raise many questions and open the eyes. The show’s middle section contains prints, books, and graphic materials about the abolitionist movement as well as detailed drawings of publications instructing you how to maximize the shelves for the cargo when you build your slave ship (pictured).
The exhibition’s final section offers portraiture of native Africans who managed to free themselves and create a new identity. Not surprisingly, this is the smallest section of the exhibition, and it comes with sad ironies.
A 1768 portrait of Ignatius Sancho, a free servant to the aristocratic Montagu family of England, was painted in three-quarters profile by Thomas Gainsborough, presumably after the artist finished a portrait of the Duke of Montagu’s wife.
The pamphlet accompanying the exhibition reads: “A note formerly inscribed on the back [of the Gainsborough] stated that ‘it was done in one hour and forty minutes,’ which suggests that it may have been the product of an impromptu sitting. As a servant of his high status, Sancho is not dressed in livery, but in a fashionable gold brocade waistcoat, white ruffled shirt, and black necktie. His gentlemanly hand-in-waistcoat pose further marks him as a man of refinement and taste. Gainsborough’s portrait of Sancho is the earliest single-figure portrait made in Britain of an Anglo-African sitter whose name is still known.”
The Elihu Yale group portrait has been in the YCBA’s collection for at least 30 years, but this is the very first time this impressive and telling work has been put on display, reported Friedlander.
The show is well worth a trip, along with an exhibition on the same floor about the work of James Northcote, who was both conservative and ahead of his time as an innovative collage artist.
Both shows close Dec. 14 and then the YCBA remains open but only until Dec. 31. After that the entire museum closes to the public for renovations. It will reopen in February 2016.
We did visit the museum for this exhibition- very powerful.
As I was told many years ago by someone much more aware than me- 'slavery" is a condition. The paintings depict enslaved Africans- children, adults, men women. Human beings with hopes, dreams, lives.. They are not "slaves". That is the condition we forced upon them. I'm hoping we can upgrade the language we use on this issue.