A change of subject from the last few posts. I rarely watch the BBC’s stuff, but occasionally Mrs G. and I sit down to see something on archaeology or history, and most recently it was Fake or Fortune, a series in which art dealer Philip Mould and BBC general factotum Fiona Bruce investigate disputed works of art. Given the conventions of documentary-making, my guess is that unsung researchers do the actual investigating, whilst “the talent” reads the script convincingly. After all, with Fiona on the news every night and on Question Time every week, and trekking round the country with Antiques Roadshow, there must be little real opportunity for lengthy research in foreign museums. Still, the investigations are fascinating and the results actual.
This episode was an update on one I remember from, I think, 2018. It was about two paintings unusual for featuring black sitters as subjects, rather than as accessories, which was certainly a legitimate theme. Unfortunately despite all the research it stuck to the conventional “Britain’s uniquely terrible slave trade” as the reason the sitters were anonymous, and it even managed to drag in “Britain’s uniquely terrible sexism against women artists.”
One picture, a “cheap buy” by an ordinary English couple, was of two beautifully dressed black children in a Caribbean landscape, one reading a Bible and gazing heavenwards, the other looking proudly at the viewer. It turned out to be by an eighteen year old Emma Soyer (nee Jones), and to date from 1831, two years (we were told) before slavery was abolished.
A subplot was that, like the sitters, Emma had been marginalised because she was a woman. This was not quite true, as she was exclusively trained by her celebrated artist step-father, exhibited at the Royal Academy, and, dying in childbirth at age 27, Wikipedia records that “The Gentleman’s Magazine described her as ‘Cut off when her reputation was about to make her fortune, and when, in spite of all obstacles, her merits were become known to her countrymen.'” She married (beneath her station, by her step-father’s reckoning) a celebrity chef, who commissioned a huge memorial over her grave. Not so marginalised after all.
As for the painting, the programme showed that in all likelihood it was a propaganda piece to support a large charitable concern set up to provide decent clothes and reading skills to enslaved girls. The chances are that Emma herself believed in this worthwhile cause. But the programme’s aim of showing her unusual sympathy for black people ignored the fact that the painting’s purpose was to harness widespread public sympathy for charity – a good motive, but not a simple one. Many of Emma’s paintings create a romanticised view of the poor for rich people’s tastes. In this case (as the programme neglected to point out), the sitters must have been British residents, and therefore not slaves. X-ray analysis showed that their clothing had been altered to make it more revealing and therefore appealing to donors (though in practice Victorian clothing societies for the poor focused on “decent and hardwearing” rather than “alluring.” Of course, the contemplative sitter appeals to the Christian giver, whilst the direct gaze of the second demands a charitable response. It’s a purpose-driven image, the equivalent of Bob Geldof’s “Give us yer f…in’ money” at LiveAid.
The programme also failed to mention that the slave trade, as such, had been abolished by British Evangelical and Quaker activists back in 1807, a humanitarian event unprecedented in human history. Slavery in the colonies was only maintained by rich vested interests (think of the WEF now), which blocked full abolition by buying parliamentary seats in “rotten boroughs.” The abolition of these seats, a year after the painting was made, opened the way for the 1833 slavery abolition desired, by then, by most of the country. So the real narrative behind the painting is not that of a rare enlightened woman artist valuing black people, but of the last stand of slave-owners against the combined religious, charitable and political will of the British people.
The second picture, from “the height of the English slave trade” in 1778, came from a stately home in Scotland, and in 2018 bore the title “Lady Elizabeth Murray.” But it also featured an unnamed but well-dressed, and beautiful, black girl. The impression given by the programme was that she was unnamed because she was black. Research showed her to be Dido Belle, born to a 14 year old slave and fathered (probably through rape) by an aristocratic naval officer, John Lindsay, stationed in the Caribbean. We learned that he brought mother and child back to England, had Dido fostered by a relative, Lord Mansfield (uncle and guardian of Lady Elizabeth), and eventually manumitted the mother and gave her enough money to build a house back in the Caribbean. So Dido was no less white than she was black, but that counts for even less today than it did in the eighteenth century, when at least the term “mulatto” was in use.
Dido grew up with Elizabeth, but on Lord Mansfield’s death was left only a small annuity and enough to buy a small house, whereas Elizabeth inherited a fortune. Dido’s father left her nothing (we infer, because she was black – though in fact he left money to his son, John, who was also “black”). Fake or Fortune seemed to ignore the likelihood that her lower status in Lord Mansfield’s family was because she was illegitimate, more than because she was black. Mansfield evidently loved and valued Dido enough to educate here and include her in a £600 painting commission. But he couldn’t entirely buck the social conventions of the time, still less treat her as a legitimate heir in his will, thereby reducing Lady Elizabeth’s prospects. The fact that she had been born a slave no doubt posed an additional social challenge. Heiresses got invited to balls – illegitimate cousins, even white ones, didn’t, any more than they could inherit the throne of England. Tough, but true, even now.
The programme also blamed the slave trade for Dido’s omission from the painting’s title. But in fact the earliest inventory “at the height of the slave trade” names the painting as “Lady Elizabeth Murray and Mrs. Davinière,” demonstrating that her respectable, if relatively humble, marriage, was noted after she left the household. Later inventories, closer to abolition, understandably forget the connection, mentioning Dido as “a negro companion,” and then omitting her altogether when Lady Elizabeth Mary Finch-Hatton’s painting joined the other nobles in the family castle.
But that leads me to the thought-provoking update section in the Fake or Fortune programme. We saw someone triumphantly re-titling the portrait as Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray by David Martin, 1778. Did the enlightened Lord Mansfield or the artist really want the illegitimate companion to be seen as the main subject of the composition? Would Dido herself prefer to be known by her mother’s slave-name, rather than by the married name that gave her legitimacy, which was originally attached to the picture? Would she not actually be embarrassed to be given priority over her guardian’s legitimate heir, simply because her mother had dark skin?
For the update’s main purpose was to show how dramatic events since 2018 (scenes of BLM demonstrations, statues in Bristol being vandalised) have changed social values (black people must get mentioned first!) and have massively increased the value of both these paintings. And so, for all the depth of research and intellectual respectability, the BBC and the production company took the BLM protests at face value, blind to the Astroturf nature of that Marxist outfit some of us recognised from the start, and to the subsequent fraud convictions of its leaders, who cared little for any black lives except their own.
The irony is that those who live in the rarified world of paintings worth hundreds of thousands of pounds are, in essence, the same privileged elites who ran the slave trade. The mass of working class people a couple of centuries ago sympathised with black slaves because they and their daughters suffered the same kind of exploitation. Their daughters in service were raped or seduced and abandoned by “gentlemen” – their sons were press-ganged into naval servitude, or sweated for low wages on the land, if they were not evicted in favour of sheep or machinery. High art was well beyond their means, as it still is today.
But those like Sir John Lindsay found great financial gain from trading in black people – as their descendants now see great financial gain in trading in paintings of those same black people, their value increased by pushing a distorted version of history that blames our nation for their own ancestral sins. But it was never “the British” who benefitted from the cruel transatlantic trade in human souls. In fact, given the triangular nature of the trade, few had even seen a black person, except for the few seamen or servants scattered around the big ports and country houses.
The beneficiaries of slavery were those with wealth and power, the equivalent, and sometimes the ancestors, of those great and good who visited Epstein Island, who run nations or become rock idols leaving a trail of illegitimate children, who hog the world’s wealth through the sweat of taxpayers… and who can afford to bid king’s ransoms for paintings in prestigious auction-houses. Would Dido really be flattered that the massive increase in the value of her portrait over the last seven years is simply because “You black people have become so fashionable, Dahling!”?
Naturally, it’s those with a six-figure painting of an ex-slave on their wall who most vehemently condemn those ordinary people who see their livelihoods and their daughters’ virtue threatened by the cheap labour trafficked in, like the slaves of old, to maximise their profits. Fake narratives earn you a fortune, after all.
