ABSTRACT: Over the course of the 1820s, as British slaveholders were drawn increasingly into a bitter and contested debate about the future of slavery, the nation’s art institutions were thriving. The foundation of a National Gallery in 1824 was the culmination of several decades of lobbying from various quarters, and the concomitant rise of private collections in Britain. The wealth and confidence of British art collectors and connoisseurs in the period is amply demonstrated in a grand painting by Dutch artist Pieter Christoffel Wonder, Patrons and Lovers of Art (1830). I take this painting as the starting point for seeking to understand how the brutal system of colonial slavery infiltrated the world of aesthetics and taste during this seminal period in the history Britain’s major art institutions. Wonder’s careful delineation of collectors, and works of art with their own individual provenance histories, entangled with and ultimately dependent upon the economy of plantation slavery, is a useful springboard for a deeper consideration of the cultural legacies of slave-ownership, encouraging reflection about a history that has for too long remained silent.
Drawing on the work of Arjun Appadurai (The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective) I focus in particular on the ‘biography’ of one of the works of art shown in Wonder’s painting: Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene (J. Paul Getty Museum) by Renaissance ‘master’ Parmigianino, and trace its links with the Taylor family whose tremendous wealth derived from the plantations of Jamaica. The painting was purchased by Englishman John Taylor from the Barberini family in Rome in the early 1770s, and inherited by descent and marriage to one of the subjects in Wonder’s painting, George Watson Taylor, a member of parliament, outspoken opponent of emancipation, and a prominent art collector. The essay reflects on the significance and nature of inherited family wealth, revealing disturbing parallels between the commodification of art and human beings. It highlights the links between slave-ownership and the formation of private and public art collections in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Wonder’s painting, and the ownership history of Parmigianino’s Virgin and Child in particular, raise significant questions about the relationship between transatlantic slavery, art collecting, and the early formation of the public art museum in Britain.
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Sarah Thomas has lectured widely in the UK and Australia. In 2001 her professional standing was recognised by the award of an Australian Government Centenary Medal for service to Australian society and art. She has taught in the History of Art department at Birkbeck since 2013. Previously she has taught at Kingston University and UCL. She is the inaugural Director of Birkbeck’s Centre for Museum Cultures.
Her monograph ‘Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition’ was published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in 2019. It examines the shifting iconography of slavery in British and European art between 1760 and 1840, and reconsiders how enslaved people were depicted within a historical context in which truth was deeply contested.
Other projects include ‘Colonial Ways of Seeing: Caribbean Visual Cultures, 1750-1900’ (August 2021). This special issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents is co-edited with Emily Senior and examines the ways of seeing that emerged under the conditions of slavery and its immediate aftermath. How were images and objects produced, circulated and viewed in colonial contexts? What forms of resistance are revealed by a focus on visual cultures? What traces of Black lives can yet be mined in the fragments and biases of the colonial archive?