The Black Presence in Portraiture
Samuel Reilly of Apollo Magazine chaired the event with Aloyo Akinkughe, Founder of @ablackhistory of art; Michael Ohajuni, Cultural Historian, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Arthur Timothy, artist and architect and Will Elliott, Elliott Fine Art.
The talk started with each speaker picking two or three pictures to illustrate their thoughts and I was introduced to several works I didn’t know plus it placed others in a new context. I must admit I had never thought about the black boy in Rosetti’s “The Beloved” who evidently cried while posing but in a letter mentions how his tears made his cheeks shine. The artists, Timothy, had been invited to show a couple of his own works showing himself and his brother when they were still in Sierra Leonne.
The discussion talked about how we look differently at a picture when we know the names of the sitters and more about them. One speaker took John Martin’s “Lady Elizabeth Finch Hatton and her cousin Dido Elizabeth Belle” from 1778 as an example. For many years Dido was only referred to as ‘a negress attendant’ but knowing who she really is gives the work more layers of meaning.
I was fascinated to learn about a male model from Sweden Pierre Louis Alexandre, shown here, who had been a slave in Ghana but stowed away to Stockholm where he worked as a dock labourer and artists model. There are over 40 pictures of him. I’d also not realised that Juan de Pareja who was painted by Velazquez was his slave and the picture was a study for his portrait of Innocent X.
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