The Black Presence in Portraiture
Thoughtful online discussion from London Art Week on black figures in portraits. 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 ...