In the discourse on the Black presence in Western history, it is often assumed that Africans in art were solely represented as enslaved people, with their image associated with humiliation and submission. However, a closer look reveals a more complex and nuanced history.
Portrait of an African Man (Christophle le More?) by Jan Mostaert
Early Representations
Examples of early depictions of people of African heritage can be found dating from Greek and Roman antiquity to the end of the 19th Century.
- Fayum mummy paintings: These panel portraits were a part of funerary practices in Egypt during the Imperial Roman era. An encaustic (wax) or tempera portrait was painted on a panel placed over the face of a mummy.
- Statue in the Louvre: This statue is known as Maure or Il Mauro. It is composed partly of classical Roman statue fragments (the torso clothing), and partly of elements sculpted by Nicolas Cordier in 1611 (the head). The date when this was created is disputed. It may be from Second Century CE, or it may be from the 17th Century, similar to the above statue.
- Sculpture from the Museo Nazionale Romano: From the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome. The eyes are white marble, not painted.
Current research suggests that Greek and Roman sculptures, and even carvings on buildings, were painted very colourfully. Scholars use the term polychromy to describe statues or decorations that are made of materials in or painted with multiple colours.
Example of Polychromy of ancient sculptures
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The Dutch Golden Age
The Dutch Golden Age, a period in Dutch history when Rembrandt lived and worked, is commonly perceived as an exclusively European phenomenon, but archival studies reveal that the population of the Netherlands was not at all homogenous. A small community of free Black people formed in the period 1620-1670 along the Jodenbreestraat in Amsterdam, which happened to be the place where Rembrandt resided.
Rembrandt van Rijn is known today as the most important and influential artist in Dutch history. His works are reproduced for commercial use in millions of copies on objects of everyday use, such as t-shirts, teacups, and smartphone cases. He became the ultimate symbol of Dutch culture, history, and tourism.
In 1661, Rembrandt painted an intimate study of two African men, presumably brothers, in which he managed to depict their individuality free from stereotypical assumptions. However, this fact has been omitted or hardly mentioned in the art historical scholarship on the African presence in early modern Europe.
Rembrandt van Rijn, Two African Men, 1661, Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands.
This remarkable painting hangs today at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, an art museum that houses Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Additionally, it was a former residence of Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, a German humanist prince and art collector, but also the governor-general of Dutch Brazil and the initiator of the Dutch slave trade.
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Rembrandt painted African sitters (probably neighbors) on several occasions, but The Two African Men are considered his most important depiction of Black people. It is important to stress that this work is not a portrait but a tronie, a genre developed exclusively in Dutch and Flemish art of the 16th and 17th centuries, serving as a bust-length physiognomical study of a “typical” human character. This tronie, however, is not so typical for this genre.
In Two African Men, Rembrandt also indicated an emotional relationship between the two models. He captured the men in an intimate and informal moment, revealing the proximity between the two. They could have been brothers or relatives. Rembrandt presented them without conventional oriental attributes, such as instruments, bows, turbans, or earrings.
The man on the right stands straight with an animated face, looking upwards as if speaking to the man to the left. The man on the left is leaning forward, with his chin hanging over the arm of the other. Scholars suggest that this tronie reveals similar physical proximity as seen in depictions of siblings in Dutch family portraits. The identities of the two models are impossible to establish, as no extant documents or bills link this painting to specific individuals.
Other notable depictions from this era include:
- Portrait of an African Man (Christophle le More?) by Jan Mostaert.
- Head of an African, a charcoal drawing by Albrecht Dürer.
- Four Studies of a Head of a Moor by Peter Paul Rubens.
- Portrait of a Young Black Man by Gerrit Dou, also known as Gerard Dow.
Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Historian Aston Gonzalez’s Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century extends the prehistory of the Black Arts movement-as well as the Harlem Renaissance- to a critical period in the middle of the nineteenth century, when imagery was central to the fight against slavery. Black artists engaged in the nation’s first civil rights movement produced engravings, photographs, and moving panoramas.
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Few Black visual artists could reach a mass audience in the 1850s. All of them were part of activist networks supporting abolition and civil rights. To confront the prevailing racist imagery of the day, Black artists had to work on more than one front. Early photographic portraits of prominent African American clergy, business leaders, and musicians, for instance, celebrated Black achievement. But they had to be circulated (at a time when photographs were not reproducible) in order to counter the racist “Bobolition” and “Amalgamation” prints popular in the 1830s and 1840s.
Other artists, such as Henry Box Brown, William Wells Brown, and James Presley Ball, embraced panoramas as a means of visual depicting the horrors of slavery. Instead of peaceful rolling landscapes, “[William Wells] Brown inverted the focus from landscape to black bodies and enslavement".
The final chapters focus on the Civil War years and the Reconstruction that followed. Although photographs could be made in mobile studios and reproduced cheaply during the war, Black photographers and printmakers did not play the prominent role that Matthew Brady and his white colleagues did in documenting the conflict in the South.
Gonzalez identifies a particularly intriguing portrait by James Presley Ball, of an unidentified woman and the two Union soldiers who helped her escape Kentucky after she had fled to Union lines. According to Gonzalez, their pose “captured the liminal state of freedom of the African American woman”.
Still, Black artists and cultural producers continued their political work. W.E.B. Du Bois’s collection of photographs for the Paris Exhibition of 1900 is one of the most familiar examples of a Black visionary harnessing visual culture for political purposes at the turn of the twentieth century.
The Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts Movement, explored in the Tate’s exhibition, developed a “Black aesthetic” apart from and oppositional to white, Western art.
Barkley L. Hendricks in front of “Bahsir (Robert Gowens),” an oil and acrylic on canvas that he made in 1975.
The Image of the Black in Western Art
In the 1960s, art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times.
The project has expanded to include:
- The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art asks how the black figure was depicted by artists from the non-Western world.
- The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art is the first comprehensive survey of the visual representation of people of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean, some twelve million of whom were forcibly imported into the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade.
One reason for a scarcity of people of colour in historical artworks may be that some have been edited out by later generations. For example, a group portrait painted in 1837 depicted the Frey family children, and the enslaved black youth Bélizaire. A later inheritor of the painting had Bélizaire painted over.
