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Witnessing Slavery Art and Travel
in the Age of Abolition
Sarah Thomas
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British
Art New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019 Hardback, 288 pp., 168 black and white
images ISBN 978-1913107055. $55
Reviewed by Laurent Bury Université Lumière–Lyon 2
For the readers who could decide to buy this book on the sole faith of
its front cover or its title, two warnings may be in order. Even though the
picture chosen to strike the buyer’s attention in a bookshop is an oil
painting, John Simpson’s The Captive Slave,
exhibited in 1827 at the Royal Academy, Witnessing
Slavery is mostly about a different kind of art, since it discusses works
on paper rather than canvases, printed illustrations rather than independent
images. Besides, the word “slavery” is here taken in a specific meaning, as
Sarah Thomas exclusively focuses on the practice as it existed in the Americas,
as part of the Transatlantic Exchange which sent millions of Africans to
plantations in the New World. The fact that Eastern slavery remained a source
of inspiration for artists until the end of the 19th century is acknowledged,
and an example of such Orientalism is even reproduced (William Alan’s Slave Market, Constantinople of 1838),
but precisely because this painting “reminds us of what their [the artists examined
in the book] images were not: grand, classical and imbued with historical
symbolism” [210]. The potential buyer’s attention should therefore be attracted
by the subtitle: Art and Travel in the
Age of Abolition is slightly more explicit about the contents of the
volume, focusing on not so famous artists who went abroad in order to bring
back a testimony of what they had observed “on the spot”, at a time when a
possible abolition of the slave trade, or even the end of slavery itself, was hotly
debated in Europe, and especially in England, between the 1770s and the 1840s. The
aim of this book thus differs considerably from recent publications such as
Denise Murrell’s Posing Modernity : The
Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, the catalogue of the
exhibition co-organised in 2018-2019 by the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia
University and the Musée d’Orsay, or Jan Marsh’s slightly older Black Victorians : Black People in
British Art 1800-1900, published to accompany an exhibition at the Manchester
City Art Gallery in 2005-2006. Sarah Thomas is lecturer in the Department of History of Art at
Birkbeck, University of London. Her subject is those pictures which were
created in what Ian Baucom calls a “testamentary space”, that is, they were
attributed a documentary value by the amateur or professional artists who
insisted they had been eyewitnesses of what they depicted in their works.
Travelling supposedly gave their images an epistemological and scopic authority,
since the I/eye of the itinerant painter was to be implicitly trusted. The
visual culture thus produced was available to advocates or adversaries of
slavery: strangely enough for our modern eyes, “it is mistaken to assume that
the representation of brutality directed toward the enslaved is automatically
censorious of that brutality” [32]. While claiming to be “true to nature” as
mere “statements of facts”, those pictures could be appropriated for various
uses, whatever their picturesque or scientific ambitions. A second chapter reminds the reader that the abolition of the slave
trade in 1807 by Britain, followed by the emancipation of its slaves in 1833,
can be perceived in the context of the “cult of sensibility”: the capacity to
entertain some compassion for the victims of the slave system was in itself a
proof of feelings, since one had to be a sensitive being in order to imagine
the Blacks’ pain. The scenes witnessed by artists could only inspire them with
heartfelt sympathy for the sufferers, and the same had to be true for the
viewers of their pictures, at least according to the abolitionists. Sarah
Thomas analyses the two iconic images of the abolition movement: “Am I not a
Man and a Brother?”, created ca.
1787, remains quite famous nowadays and appealed directly to the viewer’s
feelings, but the “Description of a Slave Ship” print (1789) relied on a more
intellectual reaction of moral indignation, through its graphic display of
inhumanity, with dozens of (black) bodies crammed into the lower level of a
ship. However, it was one thing to display manacled, passive slaves, and
another to show their occasional rebellion, either as caricatures or as
examples of “high art”. In the next three chapters, Sarah Thomas studies three very different
artists, whose representations of slavery obeyed completely opposite agendas.
The Anglo-Italian painter Agostino Brunias (ca.
1730-1796) spent a whole decade in the West Indies, from 1765 to 1775, his main
patron being Sir William Young, a rich planter, for whom he painted idyllic
market scenes or contented slaves peacefully dancing, “mimicking the cultured
refinement of their wealthy European counterparts” [75]. Brunias’ vision of
social harmony and racial diversity was no more than an imperial fiction: his
“idealised view of life” in the Caribbean “served to assuage mounting colonial
anxieties concerning the future of the slave trade” [59] and “defused fears of chaos
and black savagery” [84; “diffused” is the word used on that page, but the
meaning is clearly “defused”]. Those paintings reflected the opinion of
anti-abolitionists who advocated “amelioration”, resorting to benevolence
towards slaves so that they could multiply and thus make commerce triangulaire superfluous, since there would be enough
local labour born in slavery to dispense with the importation of new workers.
This colonial Arcadia of idle slaves could also be opposed to the predicament
of the British working class, slavery being presented by anti-abolitionists as
far more “comfortable” than factory life. John Gabriel Stedman (1744-1797) was the son of a Scottish father and a
Dutch mother. As a soldier, he was sent to the colony of Suriname between 1773
and 1777 to quench a slave rebellion. When he came back to the Old Continent,
he decided to use the many sketches he had drawn in Southern America (only one
of them has survived) and to write a Narrative
of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Suriname,
published in London in 1796. The book has become famous because some of its
printed plates, which had been entrusted to a whole team of engravers, were
prepared by no other than William Blake, many people believing those pictures
to be Blake’s own creations. Stedman seems to have occupied an intermediate
position: he owned a slave in Europe but he had fallen in love with a Black
woman in Suriname, and the way he described some of the atrocities committed
against the rebel slaves, in words and in images, made him an involuntary ally
of the abolitionists, even though his publisher’s interventions “attempted to
shift the author’s ambivalence about race and slavery towards a pro-slavery
position” [102]. Architect James Hakewill (1778-1843) had published in 1820 a Picturesque Tour of Italy, which was
followed in 1825 by a Picturesque Tour of
the Island of Jamaica, for the illustration of which he himself had
transformed his Jamaican drawings into aquatints, so as to make the work of
engravers easier. “While Picturesque Tour
may have begun as a project designed to satisfy the burgeoning market for
exotic scenery, by the mid-1820s it had mutated into a vital tool of propaganda
in the desperate struggle for planter survival” [133]. It is particularly
interesting to see how Hakewill’s “neutral”, placid topographical views were
reused a few years later by Adolphe Duperly in order to depict various scenes
of the Christmas Rebellion of 1831-1832, one of Jamaica’s most significant
slave uprisings. With Hakewill, slavery appeared as an ordinary element of the
colonial landscape: “he effectively normalised the institution, transforming it
into a palatable message for his anxious clientele” [125]. But the flames,
smoke, soldiers and casualties added by Duperly show how deceptive such a
reassuring conception could be. Under the title “Slavery as spectacle”, the final chapter compares the
work of three artists who spent some time in Rio de Janeiro in the 1820s. As
opposed to the world of West Indian plantations, Brazil was an urban slave society, and slaves could be
seen everywhere in the streets, either at work or enjoying some leisure, being
sold or being disciplined. For early-nineteenth-century French or British
artists, it was obviously much easier “to reveal the horrific legacy of the
Portuguese slave trade than it was to draw attention to ongoing brutality of
slave life in [their own] nation’s own colonies” [169]. Jean-Baptiste Decret
(1768-1848) fled Paris in 1816 to become official history painter to the
Brazilian court; the illustrations of his Voyage
pittoresque et historique au Brésil (1834-39) show some examples of
barbaric punishment, but the text of the book seems to express more humanity
towards “Negroes”. Augustus Earle (1793-1838) was probably an abolitionist and
may have intended his boisterous watercolours for a travel book; in 1824, he
sent an oil painting to the Royal Academy, Gate
and Slave Market at Pernambuco as an expression of his anti-slavery stance.
The pictures included by Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858) in his own Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil (1835)
had neither the intensity nor the humour of Earle’s scenes. In her conclusion, Sarah Thomas discusses two examples of “high art”
reaction to slavery: Turner’s Slavers
throwing overboard the dead and dying, typhoon coming and François-Auguste
Biard’s The Slave Trade, which were
both on display at the RA exhibition in 1840 (it is indeed very unfortunate
that the Biard exhibition which should have been hosted at the Musée Victor
Hugo in Paris could not open this winter because of the pandemic). While
Thackeray made fun of Turner’s eccentricities – in particular the
representation of iron chains miraculously floating in the ocean – Biard
offered “a gratuitously detailed, voyeuristic and unambiguous catalogue of
human abuses” [221], this “litany of horrors” being “an acknowledged
abolitionist tactics” allowing to visualise “what was otherwise out of sight
and unimaginable to most people in Britain” [221-222].
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