The fourteen essays of consistently high quality by various hands in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World comprise, in the words of its editors, “a series of case studies [that investigate] the relationships between the placement of the slave's hypervisible body within the violent foundational dynamics of the trans-Atlantic, from 1599 to the date of the official abolition of the regime in its last hemispheric stronghold (Brazil, 1888)” (7). The contributors to the collection all deal to varying degrees with the problem David Bindman identifies in “Subjectivity and Slavery in Portraiture: From Courtly to Commercial Societies”: “The terms ‘slave’ and ‘portrait’ constitute together an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, for a portrait … has as its defining purpose the affirmation of the sitter's subjectivity, autonomy, and integrity. [The subject of the portrait] exercises with confidence – even arrogance – the ‘freedom’ … denied by definition to slaves” (75). The complexity of the problem depends on how strictly a visual representation must meet the criteria for a portrait outlined by Susan Scott Parrish in “Embodying African Knowledge in Colonial Surinam: Two William Blake Engravings in Stedman's 1796 Narrative”: “an intended reference to or copy of a particular and identifiable person, a subject's participation in or even initiation of the image-making situation, and a rhetorical staging of identity for an anticipated audience” (258).
Strictly speaking, according to such criteria the image of Phillis Wheatley that serves as the frontispiece to her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773), the subject of both Marcia Pointon's challenging “Slavery and the Possibilities of Portraiture” and Eric Slauter's deeply researched “Looking for Scipio Moorhead: An ‘African Painter’ in Revolutionary North America,” can barely be called a portrait because we know nothing about her “participation in or even initiation of the image-making situation” beyond the fact that the image was created at the behest of her slave-owning patron, the Countess of Huntingdon. Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff raises similar questions about the relationship between the sitters and the genre of portraiture in “Who Is the Subject? Marie-Guihelmine Benoist's Portrait d’Une Négresse.”
With the exception of Pointon, the contributors agree that most eighteenth-century visual representations of slaves and servants have them deferentially avoid looking directly at the external viewer. Bindman astutely remarks, “Black slave/servants appear in only a minority of portraits [in the early modern period], and they do not represent an index of the availability of black slaves, or even prove that the sitter owned one, for they may be fictive, or provided by the painter” (77). A direct gaze is associated with assertions of autonomy and/or authority by slaves or former slaves. For example, in “Three Gentlemen from Esmeraldas: A Portrait Fit for a King,” Tom Cummins observes that in the Portrait of Don Francisco de Arobe and His Sons Don Pedro and Don Domingo (1599), “Don Francisco looks out at the viewer with a fixed and determined, almost icy stare. It is a stare that borders on the magisterial, similar to royal portraits as well as those of viceroys and bishops” (139). And Carmen Fracchia argues compellingly in “Metamorphoses of the Self in Early Modern Spain: Slave Portraiture and the Case of Juan de Pareja” that the “inherently contradictory nature of slave portraiture drove the former slave painter Juan de Pareja to the peak of his artistic and intellectual abilities when he decided to depict himself [in The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1661] in order to proclaim his own subjectivity” (164).
Further complicating the category of slave portraiture is the degree to which an ethnographic context influences the depiction of an individual sitter, the subject of Rebecca P. Brienen's “Albert Eckhout's African Woman and Child (1641): Ethnographic Portraiture, Slavery, and the New World Subject,” as well as James Smalls's “Exquisite Empty Shells: Sculpted Slave Portraits and the French Ethnographic Turn.” Both essays address the question of how to distinguish between ethnographic types and the portraiture of specific individuals.
The three excellent essays that conclude Slave Portraiture all deal with the ways in which nineteenth-century artists handle the themes of identity, authority, and ethnography in the visual representations of identifiable heroic individuals: Helen Weston, “The Many Faces of Toussaint Louverture”; Toby Maria Chieffo-Reidway, “Cinqué: A Heroic Portrait for the Abolitionist Cause”; and Daryle Williams, “The Intrepid Mariner Simão: Visual Histories of Blackness in the Luso-Atlantic at the End of the Slave Trade.”
Some factual errors: the image of William Sessarakoo (46) appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1750, not 1850; although “Huntingdon” is spelled correctly in Slauter's essay, it is consistently misspelled in the endnotes; Wheatley was free by 18 October 1773 (108); Mary Whateley Darwall's “An Elegy on Leaving —” is misattributed to Wheatley (114 n. 31).
The range and quality of the essays in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World render it a fitting tribute to its coeditor Angela Rosenthal, who died while it was in the final stages of production.
