Art Against the Slave Trade 1730-1860

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ART AGAINST THE SLAVE TRADEJan Marsh

For the 200th anniversary of legislation banning the

Slave Trade in British ships

Revised 2010

This heroic portrait of the Prince Regent by Sir Joshua

Reynolds was the star picture at the Royal Academy in

1787. Nothing remarkable about that: portraits of the

prince were de rigueur, Reynolds had done more than most

and this was the latest.

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The RA opening was a premier cultural event. This

engraving shows the Great Room at Somerset House with

pictures rising to the ceiling and fashionable London

thronging the floor. HRH and PRA in the centre below

Reynolds’ portrait. [His Royal Highness the Prince and

President of the Royal Academy Reynolds]

The portrait is now owned by Duke of Norfolk; an

autograph cop[y belongs to the city of York.

Reynolds was renowned for going beyond likeness to

construct historical identities through aspect,

allusion, accessories. So as someone always on the

lookout for black figures in British painting, my eye

was drawn to the subsidiary personage, the valet

fastening the Regent’s sword belt. Was he a member of

the royal household? Or an invention by the artist? who

introduced a great grey stallion into another portrait

of Prinny. Why was he chosen?

It is surely significant that the valet of African

ancestry was included in a major public work the same

year as the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade

was launched in London; indeed in the very same month.

There must be some connection. Fashionable London was a

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small place: topics of the day were shared by all

members of what was then called Society. Especially as

the valet was introduced on to the canvas only days

before exhibition; this explains why the figure is

unfinished, in these passages : the paint was probably

not yet dry when the work went up.

Art historians don’t tell much about Reynolds’ political

positions so it took me a while to discover that he was

one of those present to inaugurate the Abolition Society

on 22 May 1718, an event summoned to formally agree the

parliamentary campaign fronted by William Wilberforce,

with which we are all now so familiar. ‘After dinner

the subject of the Slave-trade was purposely introduced’

wrote Thomas Clarkson. ‘Sir Joshua Reynolds gave his

unqualified approbation of the abolition of this cruel

traffic’1 However indirect, the young manservant must

allude to this issue.

Clarkson was responsible for organising the grassroots

campaign against the slave trade, Wilberforce for the

long-drawn-out parliamentary campaign. Granville Sharp

was the third leading white campaigner, concentrating on

legal challenges. One notable campaigning tactic was

the use of visual imagery: the slave ship plan, the

medallion with kneeling figure and emotive appeal: ‘Am I

not a Man and a Brother’. Another tactic was poetic

composition, emotionally appealing verses expressing the

plight of the enslaved to rouse public conscience.

These are well documented and they set me wondering if 1 Clarkson 1808, I, 252-4.

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anything similar took place in what was the high

cultural field of painting. Today I’m tracing a sort of

Abolitionist iconography, for the context of British

campaigning against slavery in the 18th and 19th

centuries.

As with the campaigns against apartheid South Africa and

for the release of Nelson Mandela, there was something

of an Abolitionist bandwagon in the 1780s. And as with

the Free Mandela concerts and tee-shirts, one must not

mistake Abolitionist images for agents: they were

reflections of the struggle being waged fundamentally by

the enslaved and disfranchised people themselves.

More recently, while curating the exhibition Black

Victorians, I was also struck by the long shadow the Slave

Trade cast over art in Britain in 19th century, as I will

show.

Press comments on Reynolds’ portrait of the Prince of

Wales were generally hostile to the valet’s inclusion,

or mocking. Could the spendthrift Regent not afford a

white servant? Was he being measured for a pair of

breeches, or even about to be disrobed – a most

startling idea for a royal portrait. As far as I know,

no direct link was made with any Abolitionist stirrings.

British action against slavery had a whole history

before 1787. It’s not too surprising that Reynolds was

a supporter. Despite his promotion of ideal forms of

physical beauty in art, he was interested in people of

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non-European ancestry; witness his portraits of Cherokee

chiefs and O‘Mai from the Pacific Islands.

The year before the portrait of Prince Regent, he

exhibited a portrait of Lord Mansfield, who was a key

legal figure in the campaign against enslavement, though

not perhaps an unquestioned hero.

Reynolds also produced this familiar image, often said

to depict of Francis Barber, servant and beneficiary of

Samuel Johnson. Johnson famously raised a toast ‘to

the next insurrection of the Negroes in the West

Indies’; Reynolds was an executor of his will. This is

one of several copies; the original is usually dated to

the 1770s, when Barber was in his mid-30s, but it was

first exhibited at the British Institution in 1813. In

fact, however, Barber was probably not the sitter here,

who remains anonymous. I am not going to enter the

thickets of sitter identification, but merely observe

that it is a grand manner presentation, with an aspect

of nobility in the turn of the head. Which, it has been

said, endows the subject with a gravitas and

significance that would have been unacceptable to the

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defenders of slavery.2 Whether it was intended to be

unacceptable is a question worth asking.

My second observation is the number of copies of this

portrait. Tate Gallery has two, Dr Johnson’s House a

third; there are possibly others, probably all done by

students of Reynolds as practice pieces. Copying was a

standard part of training in oil painting, for which the

rendering of flesh tones was an important aspect.

Pigments and techniques for painting pink-skins were

therefore elements in art training. Copies of this work

probably indicate its use in learning how to paint dark-

skinned sitters. Of which there were a few

significant examples in this earlier period, with more

or less direct links to slavery.

For example, this portrait of Ignatius Sancho, by Thomas

Gainsborough, now in the National Gallery of Canada,

which was painted in Bath in 1780. It was engraved in

1782 for publication of Sancho’s Correspondence, one of

the books of the day, whose epigraph was from Vergil 2 See Rosalie McCrea, British Society for 18th Century Studies, 2006, online abstract

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‘quamvis ille niger, quamvis tu candidus esses’ (‘just

as he is black, you are white’). It also had an

introduction by Joseph Jekyll arguing against the

‘vulgar prejudice and popular insult’ that held

‘Negroes’ to be inferior species of homo sapiens. This

was a chief pro-slavery argument, though also held by

many who abhorred slavery.

Sancho was a personality in 18th century London, but not

of the class normally represented in oil portraiture.

Why is this an exception? Was his portrait also a

gesture against ‘vulgar prejudice and insult’, and

against the defenders of slavery? Sancho was publicly

known as an opponent of slavery at least from 1775 when

parts of his correspondence on the topic with Lawrence

Sterne were published.

The next picture is more ambiguous - John Singleton

Copley’s painting of an incident in Cuba in 1849 when

young man named Brook Watson was attacked by shark while

swimming in Havana harbour and lost a leg. At the time

of the incident Watson was engaged in slave trading and

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slave smuggling between New England, West Africa and

Caribbean. Nearly 30 years later, as wealthy London

businessman he commissioned this painting and requested

the inclusion of the Black figure for sake of accuracy –

one of the ‘faithful Negroes’ to feature in paintings of

this era. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in

1778 under the title ‘A boy attacked by a shark and

rescued by some seamen in a boat; founded on a fact

which happened in the harbour of the Havannah’.

Art historian Albert Boime has shown in detail3 how

Copley’s picture relates to the slave trade and Middle

Passage when dead or dying slaves were thrown overboard

to be devoured, and sometimes as bait for shark when

crew needed food. It’s an oblique but eloquent allusion:

white Brook Watson being rescued from the fate to which

so many black victims were consigned. One notable

aspect is mirror image of black and white figures,

visually up-ending the usual relation of white trader

and enslaved, emasculated African

The early 1780s were characterised by the rise of

Abolitionist protest. A key moment came in 1783 when

the insurance claim of the slave ship Zong was disputed

in the courts: infamously, the ship’s captain had

thrown overboard the sick members of his cargo, in order

to claim their value from insurance. Olaudah Equiano (of

whom more later) and Granville Sharp made this a cause

celebre.

3 See Boime 1990, chapter 2

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This incidentally was the same year that Copley

exhibited his own portrait of Lord Mansfield; I’m

guessing as another gesture of political opinion.

The next work on the screen dates from the year after

Watson and the Shark: it is Zoffany’s now celebrated

portrait of Lady Elizabeth Murray and her cousin Dido

Elisabeth Lindsay, from 1779, now in Scone Palace.

This is a straightforward society portrait, or at least

looks like one. A pretty, black attendant was a very

familiar motif in aristocratic female portraiture. In

this case, the political angle – it’s not a subtext,

it’s an overt element – derives in part from the

conjunction of the two women, and from their relation to

that significant figure in Abolitionist history, Lord

Mansfield. Lady Elizabeth was Mansfield’s niece, Dido

Elizabeth his great-niece: her mother was an enslaved

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woman, her father one of Mansfield’s nephews. They both

lived in the Mansfield household at Kenwood, as we saw

in the 2013 film Belle, by Amma Asante.

Lord Mansfield was responsible for one of two or three

landmark cases in the history of Abolition. The first

was that of Jonathan Strong, in court 1767 and 1769

after a former owner had him kidnapped in London.

Granville Sharp took up his case, but as Strong was

leaving the courtroom the ship’s captain, acting for his

owner, tried to seize him; then Sharp was sued for

return of property. The most famous test case was that

of James Somerset in 1772, who having tried to escape

was also the subject of a legal claim for habeas corpus,

the lawsuit in which Lord Chief Justice Mansfield ruled:

‘No master could take a slave by force to be sold

abroad’. It was an incomplete but effective form of

emancipation, acclaimed by the Black community and

Abolitionists in Britain. Somewhat erroneously, the

Mansfield Judgement went down in history as the

declaration that slavery could not exist in Britain

The iconography I’m tracing is plainly not one of

slavery or black experience in any way; it is

iconography of what we’d call white liberalism or

humanitarianism. All sections of British society and

economy were dependent on or beneficiaries of profits

from the slave trade and slave labour; indeed the rising

economic wealth of the nation in the 18th century can be

generally ascribed to slavery. This prosperity includes

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high cultural consumption in form of easel painting,

sculpture and decorative art. All art of this era is

thus implicated; this paper aims to isolate certain

works with more direct connections.

This portrait is of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, by William

Hoare, from 1733. Diallo was an educated man from a

family of Muslim clerics in West Africa. In 1731 he was

enslaved and sent to a plantation in America. By his own

enterprise, and assisted by a series of spectacular

strokes of fortune, he arrived in London in 1733, where

he was recognised as a pious and educated man, mixed

with intellectual society, was introduced at Court and

was redeemed from slavery by public subscription. IN

later Abolitionist campaigns he featured as a key figure

in asserting the moral rights and humanity of black

people.

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A few years later came W Ansah Sessarakoo, a young

African from present-day Ghana who was delivered into

slavery en route to a Grand Tour of Europe, and became

the subject of what we’d call a diplomatic incident. He

later came to London as an honoured and exotic visitor,

and was presented to the King, than which nothing

higher. This portrait by Gabriel Mathias was painted

in Britain 1749-50, apparently to mark the publication

of Sessarakoo’s account of his experiences The Royal

African 1749-50. It belongs to the Menil Collection in

Houston.

Returning as it were to 1787, and the launch of

Abolitionist campaign, one notes how its methods

included ‘innovative forms of visual propaganda’

including as mentioned the slave ship plan and the

famous Wedgwood medallion, Am I Not a Man and a Brother?

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which had an exceptionally rapid and wide-ranging

distribution. Simultaneously the Committee to Abolish

the Slave Trade commissioned and promoted poems as well

as tracts and narratives by Clarkson4, Ottobah Cugoano5

and Olaudah Equiano6. Wordsworth recalled ‘a whole

nation crying with one voice’7

1788, which has been termed ‘the campaigning year’8 saw

George Morland’s intervention in the debate: Execrable

Human traffick, or the Affectionate Slaves. Shown at the RA in

1788 [ # 201], this referenced a poem by William Collins

of the same year, both based one would guess on

Clarkson’s affecting invocation of an imagined scene on

African coast ‘which might not unreasonably be presumed

to have been presented to our view, had we been really

there’.9 A man is being forcibly parted from wife and

child and is about to be put into boat, for transfer to

slave ship lying offshore. As befitted a campaigning

image, the painting was later reproduced as an 4 Slavery and Commerce of Human Species 17865 Thoughts and Sentiments 1787 6 The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, 17897 Wordsworth, The Prelude 1805, x, 2128 Carey 2005 1549 Clarkson 1786, 118

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engraving, which is seen here: the contemporary

equivalent of an art poster; this print has been

additionally coloured up.

Artists had no observation of such scenes: they

constructed images as they might depict Biblical

characters or the signing of Magna Carta.

Next year Morland produced a companion piece entitled

African Hospitality, again depicting an imagined scene, this

time of an actual shipwreck on the southern African

coast in 1782; those who reached shore were assisted by

local people. A very telling example of the sentimental

appeal to British viewers constructing ‘the African’ as

naturally compassionate and generous; here in contrast

to the pathetic depiction of victims in Execrable Human

Traffick.

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A comparable message is seen in another work of 1789:

Carl von Breda’s Portrait of a Swedish Gentleman instructing a Negro

prince, which is in fact a dual portrait, now in the

National Museum Stockholm. The European is Carl

Bernhard Wadstrom, a Swedish abolitionist familiar with

the Guinea coast, who was in London from 1788 giving

first-hand information on the trade and aiming to found

philanthropic colony in Africa. His companion is Peter

Panah from Sierra Leone, who was brought to Britain for

education but rather promptly died. This was also

reproduced as a mezzotint, being a subject to appeal in

Abolitionist circles, focussing on the teaching of

literacy and piety offered to ‘Africa’ by European

philanthropists. The portrait of Pannah and Wadstrom

was variously titled or subtitled ‘The Planter

Instructing his Negro’ and ‘The Benevolent Effects of

Abolishing Slavery’.

The following year the RA saw another campaigning image,

entitled The Kidnapping of the Negroes, as described by Mr Wadstrom,

by Elias Martin ARA [RA 1790 # 95] together with a

second scene by Martin, that may have been contextually

related, showing Our first Parents (aka Adam & Eve) in their

state of innocence. In contrast to European kidnapping,

this may well have been a declaration of universal

ancestry, against the slavers’ view of Africans as a

separate species. Both works are currently unlocated

have vanished.

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Von Breda remained in London for a decade, partly spent

in portraits of Abolitionists, including Thomas

Clarkson10, James Ramsay11 and Joshua Reynolds12

Portraits of Wilberforce following his launch of the

parliamentary campaign in 1789 also belong to this

Abolitionist iconography. 1790 saw a portrait of

Granville Sharp at the RA.

For us, perhaps the most wished-for portrait is that of

Equiano by William Denton, the basis of this now

celebrated frontispiece to the Interesting Narrative,

published 1789. This was part of the formal campaign,

and one can assume that Denton’s portrait belonged here

too. Denton worked mainly as miniaturist, and one would

guess that his portrait of Equiano was on a small scale,

as many were when commissioned for illustration, not an

oil for exhibition in its own right; even so it is

surprising that it seems to have vanished without trace.

10 NPG 23511 NPG 255912 RA 1792 #390, unlocated

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It is also telling, that though Equiano was a

longstanding campaigner and colleague of Clarkson from

way back, he was not accorded the dignity of a formal

oil portrait. He could have been regarded as another

living example of the Benevolent Effects of Abolishing

Slavery or in his case, of freeing himself.

1792 saw this allegorical work by Samuel Jennings, Liberty

Displaying the Arts and Sciences , shown at the RA that year.

The white female is Liberty, offering knowledge and

civilisation to the grateful black group, whose

companions in the background enjoy pastoral leisure.

This was painted for the Free Library Philadelphia and

Jennings was an American, but it was produced and shown

in Britain and partakes of that sentimental belief in

benevolent effects of abolition, as well as the

anticipated gratitude of the enslaved, as in Am I not a

Man and a Brother?

Then the climate altered, both politically through war

with France, and artistically at the RA, after Reynolds’

death. Abolitionist iconography is marked by gaps as

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well as canvases. Generally speaking from the mid-1790s

abolition was not a favoured subject for high art.

It was however the decade of William Blake’s now

celebrated illustrations to Steadman’s narrative of the

Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam , notably the

Flagellation image. Another reason for the absence of

Abolitionist paintings is that visual pleasure and

aesthetic admiration are generally incompatible with

such horrific themes. True, extreme violence has been a

major subject of art, in the Flaying of Marsyas, or the

Crucifixion, but these were far removed from

contemporary reality and in any case not popular in

British salons and drawing rooms. Paintings need

purchasers and an end use. Images like Blake’s would

not transfer from illustration to easel art.

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Here is one of Blake’s less familiar images: A rebel negro

armed and on his guard.

To remind us that slavery was always accompanied by

resistance and insurrection, and not all pictorial

images were of suffering and subjection.

Fuseli’s large oil The Negro Avenged from 1807 features the

tempest and shipwreck that were often invoked in

Abolitionist poems. In over-the-top Romantic style,

three figures celebrate the destruction of a slave ship,

presumably on its voyage back across the Atlantic. The

melodramatic presentation has led to mis-readings that

call this an icon of Black Prometheanism and sadism

where the man is identified as a rebel slave

aggressively yanking a ‘heavenly white woman into the

hell of sexual slavery’ [citation?] But look

carefully: she is a mixed race woman clinging

supportively to the man while an older woman looks on

from far right. All three are enslaved figures, avenged

by their oppressors’ doom. Now in the Hamburg

Kunsthalle, Fuseli’s painting was swiftly engraved for

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the publication in 1807 of Cowper’s Poems. But would

equally do to illustrate earlier anti-slavery ‘Dying

Negro’ by Bicknell and Day:

Thanks, righteous God! Revenge shall yet be mineYon flashing lightning gave the dreadful sign…

In 1807 Fuseli’s figures are surely hailing the defeat

of the slavers, the abolition of slave ships through

that year’s legislation. However, the abolition of

the slave trade did not evoke many celebratory images in

British art. Portraits of Wilberforce were more

common. The big public subject, especially at the RA,

were the heroic deeds and death of Nelson. Abolitionist

iconography effectively vanishes, to reappear after the

end of the wars with France.

But I can adduce one indirectly related work by John

Bourne from 1807: the Connoisseurs. The drawing, now in

the V&A, depicts patronage embodied: group of gentlemen

art-lovers or connoisseurs visit an impoverished artist

to appraise his painting of a classical figure, but

instead appraise the model. It’s partly a satire on

the fashion for muscular black models, employed to

demonstrate male musculature and pose for gladiator-

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style figures. But the drawing can have political

resonance. The connoisseurs inspect the model in the

manner of those purchasing slaves. In 1807 it alludes

to the fact that henceforth the planters have to rely on

plantation-grown slave labour rather than fresh supplies

from Africa.

Then in 1819 came Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa now in the

Louvre. Not usually discussed in relation to British

art, but after its sensation at the Paris Salon it was

on display in London for some weeks in 1821 at the

Egyptian Hall in Picccadilly. It is a vast canvas

nearly 5m tall and over 7m wide; viewing it is like

wrap-around cinema. Another shipwreck scene, it is also

concerned with slavery. After the 1807 Act, the

transatlantic trade increased, other nations filling the

gap left by Britain. Then under the treaty of Vienna

France regained Senegal, which became the main

embarkation point for slaving traffic. The Medusa

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foundered while taking the new governor and

administration there; the raft with 150 lesser mortals

on it was set adrift by the lifeboats, and became a

political scandal. Albert Boime writes ‘although the

issue of slavery is only superficially discussed in

connection with Gericault’s painting, it is in fact

fundamental to an understanding of its constructed

meaning’13. The very complex discussion involves

Abolitionist campaigning in France and in Britain,

Gericault’s close acquaintance with a Medusa survivor

who was a liberal abolitionist, British allegations that

slaving continued from Senegal, and Gericault’s visit to

London and Dublin in 1820-1 with this canvas. I quote:

‘The showing of the painting in London and Gericault’s

subsequent plans for a monumental pendant on the

cruelties of the slave trade strongly point to contact

with English abolitionists during this visit’.14

Because during the 1820s the campaigns revived, now

aiming to abolish slavery world-wide.

13 Boime 1990, 5114 Boime 1990, 61

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In 1827, John Simpson sent to the Royal Academy a

painting entitled The captive slave , with a quotation from

Cowper’s poem ‘Charity’ (1782) attached:

But ah! what wish can prosper, or what prayerFor merchants rich in cargoes of despair,Who drive a loathsome traffic, gauge and spanAnd buy the muscles and the bones of man?

This recently rediscovered work now in the Art Institute

Chicago is believed to be the original of the similar

work in Wilberforce House, Hull. (The foreshadowing of

Guantanamo Bay captives is uncanny but coincidental.)

The motif became an Abolitionist icon during the next

few years, through an engraving of the head, eyes raised

to heaven in supplication, based on a tondo rendering by

Simpson now in the Tate Collection - a restatement of

the sentimental appeal to humanitarian concern with the

revival of the campaign.

Finally in 1833, the Reform Parliament abolished slavery

in the British Caribbean. Implemented in 1838, this

prompted some celebratory but artistically indifferent

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works, including this familiar print after a painting by

Alexander Rippingille, To the friends of Negro emancipation,

engraved by David Lucas and published in London by

Thomas Boys in 1834. Its text reads:

A glorious and happy era on the first of August bursts upon the Western World; England strikes the manacle from the slave and bids the bond go free.

Emancipation also provoked at least one curious and

ambiguous painting in this genre work, The Toy-Seller by

William Mulready, exhibited in its first form at the RA

1837.. Here is the second version, essentially the

same, but completed twenty years later. It depicts a

white infant reacting with fear to a black pedlar – at

the same time both an everyday scene still recognisable

to many black people and also an image of displaced

anxiety, even fear, as to what full emancipation in 1838

would bring. Not articulated as such, but surely

informed by the pro-slavery warnings of the ill-effects

of abolition. Influenced, one suspects, by the

triumphalist aspect of Rippingille’s image. How widely

was emancipation welcomed in the metropolis?

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A slightly different negative note was struck by a

contemporary satire, New West India Dance to the tune of 20

millions by John Doyle [as HB] on the cost of

Emancipation: a circle of skinny slaves celebrate as

John Bull comments sourly on the compensation paid to

the planters by the British treasury.

Slavery and slaving continued in other European

colonies, and in the United States.

August Biard’s Slave Trade on the West Coast of Africa, shown in

Paris in 1835 as ‘Bartering for Slaves on the Guinea

Coast’ was an avowed contribution to the campaign in

France. In 1840 was brought to Britain for exhibition

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at the RA, specifically to coincide with the relaunched

campaign, the World Convention for the Abolition of

Slavery. 1838 had marked the end of a 50-year

campaign. But instead of disbanding, the movement

rebranded itself internationally. The World Convention

forerunner of global summits on issues of concern, with

delegates from many countries, organisations, churches

etc. The main targets were France, Spain and above all

the US. Biard’s painting was the star picture at the

Academy that year. ‘God bless you, Monsieur Biard, for

painting it!’ wrote WilliamThackeray. ‘It stirs the

heart more than a hundred thousand tracts, reports or

sermons; it must convert every man who has seen it.’15

Another critic declared that the artist ‘places himself

in the ranks of Clarkson, Wilberforce and Brougham’

[Abolitionist politicians] in arousing ‘a virtuous

indignation against the cruelties inflicted upon our

fellow–men in this accursed traffic’.16

J.M.W.Turner was the doyen of the Academy. He was

towards the end of his career and not to be outdone.

The forthcoming French exhibit, the World Convention, the

anti-slavery views of the young Queen and her new

husband, all looked set to eclipse the native British

pictures at the RA. And I’m quite convinced that Turner

transformed one of the many seascapes he had in his

studio into a competing picture, complete with

iconographic shipwreck. Slavers throwing overboard the dead and

15 Fraser’s June 1840, 73116 Art Union May 1840, 75

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dying, typhoon coming on went to the RA in 1840, to hang by

Biard’s huge picture.

This explains the inconsistencies in the picture –

debates over the ship, the storm, the sunset and above

all the unconvincing yet nonetheless horrific depiction

of large fish swarming round a leg, floating shackles

and chains. Like Reynolds, Turner probably added these

details days before exhibition, even maybe on the

‘varnishing days’ when the works were installed. Turner

was renowned for altering his canvases so they would

outshine their neighbours.

To underline the public theme, he harked back over 50

years to the infamous Zong incident of the 1780s,

recently revived as it were through the re-issue of

Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. He also

invoked the symbolic image of the trade being destroyed

by storm and tempest. Like Fuseli’s, Turner’s Slaver is

a doomed ship.

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As if this were not enough for one year, the

Abolitionists became excited enough, and unusually self-

regarding, to commission Benjamin Robert Haydon at

extremely short notice to paint the World Anti-Slavery

Convention 1840. Another vast canvas now in the

National Portrait Gallery. Here are the massed ranks of

the good and the godly: over 130 out of over 400

delegates plus some of the hundreds of individual

observers.

Such a public meeting is the least promising pictorial

subject: no heroic action, no beauty or glamour, no

expansive background. Haydon wanted to produce a

history painting of a historic event, as Thomas

Clarkson, sole survivor of the 1787 committee began his

speech.

Although my body is fast going to decay, my heart beats as warmly in this sacred cause, now in the 81st

year of my life, as it did at the age of 24, when I first took it up. And I can say further with truth,that if I had another life given to me to live, I would devote to the same object….

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My dear friends, you have a most difficult task to perform; it is neither more nor less than the extirpation of slavery from the whole world. …May theSupreme Ruler of all human events … guide your councils and give his blessing upon your labours.

The delegate chosen to respond to this opening was Henry

Beckford, of St Ann’s Jamaica, formerly enslaved, now

participating in a world event. We can understand this

picture better if we realise that visually, the artist

wished to isolate these two figures:

in the center is Clarkson, in his own natural attitude, concluding his speech. Behind, beneath and about him, are the oldest and dearest friends ofthe cause – whilst a liberated slave, now a delegate, is looking up to Clarkson with deep interest, and the hand of a friend resting with affection on his arm, in fellowship and protection; this is the point of interest in the picture, and … the object in painting it – the African sitting by the intellectual European, in equality and intelligence, whilst the patriarch of the cause points to heaven as to whom he must be grateful.’17

17 From Description issued at the same time as Haydon’s painting, p.10

BibliographyClarkson 1786: Thomas Clarkson, “An Essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, particularly the African, translated from a Latin Dissertation”, printed by J. Phillips, London 1786 Clarkson 1808: Thomas Clarkson, History of the Slave Trade, 2.vols, 1808.Boime 1990: Alfred Boime, the Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the NineteenthCentury, 1990 Carey 2005: Brychan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery 1760-1807, 2005

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That imagined vignette is an emblem of how the

Abolitionist movement saw itself as heroically

benevolent, an apt image of white emancipator above

grateful black.

To underline the message Haydon painted three names on

the red drapery he introduced into the composition:

Wilberforce, Sharp and Toussaint l’Ouverture. An

interesting selection of heroes, their names alas vetoed

by the Anti-Slavery committee.

The painting was a magnificent failure. That however

did not dampen the national pride Britain henceforth

took in being leaders of Emancipation world-wide. In

just over fifty years, Britain had switched from being

foremost promoter and beneficiary of slavery to enforcer

of abolition all over the globe. This mood intensified

in 1850s and 60s in relation to the US, and the subject

remained artistically topical right through and beyond

the American Civil War, when Britons were wont to ask

each other: ‘Are you for the North or the South?’

My final image reflects that particular moment. A

history painting of Jonathan Strong by James Hayllar

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exhibited at RA 1864 ( #514), showing the seminal moment

in 1767 when his erstwhile owner attempted to re-possess

Strong after the court hearing, and Granville Sharp

physically intervened. Again, unsurprisingly, the

composition centres not on Strong, but on his white

protector. Like so much else in respect of the cause,

here is white British self-congratulation, stretching

itself over more than a century. As I noted at the

start, Abolitionism cast a long shadow.