Images of black people
Oil paintings of aristocratic families from this period make the point clearly. Artists routinely positioned black people on the edges or at the rear of their canvasses, from where they gaze wonderingly at their masters and mistresses. In order to reveal a 'hierarchy of power relationships', they were often placed next to dogs and other domestic animals, with whom they shared, according to the art critic and novelist David Dabydeen, 'more or less the same status'. Their humanity effaced, they exist in these pictures as solitary mutes, aesthetic foils to their owners' economic fortunes.
'Owners often took it upon themselves to educate their 'possessions', and gave them lessons in accomplishments such as prosody, drawing and musical composition'
Until the abolitionist movement of the 1770s and 1780s began to challenge existing stereotypes about the moral and intellectual capacity of black people, it was not unusual for them to be portrayed as simians or as occupying the bottom rung of the great chain of being. They were also said to lack reason.
As late as 1810 the Encyclopaedia Britannica described 'the Negro' thus: 'Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race... they are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an awful example of the corruption of man left to himself.'
Nonetheless, more humane relationships between black servants and the nobility were not unknown. Owners often took it upon themselves to educate their 'possessions', and gave them lessons in accomplishments such as prosody, drawing and musical composition.
Dr Johnson famously left his Jamaica-born employee Francis Barber a £70 annuity, and refused to let him go and buy food for his cat, as he felt that 'it was not good to employ human beings in the service of animals'. Barber's last descendant still lives in the Lichfield area; he's white, his children are all daughters, and the name will die out with this generation.
Published: 2003-09-29
Bookmark with:
What are these?