Black Victorians Black People in British Art 1800-1900 Edited by Jan Marsh LUND HUMPHRIESOBSERVATIONS AND INTERPRETATION: TRAVELLING ARTISTS IN EGYPT Briony Llewellyn ihhographs, Issued in 21 monthly parts from 1846-9, the 124 plates comprising Egypt & Nubia were then bound with the eatlier Holy Land series in six volumes entitled The Holy Land, Syria, Kdumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia (Roberts) It was well received by the critics, ‘one acclaiming it ‘one of the most valuable publications of our day" (Ath., 7 Aug 1846, 843), and praised primarily for the representations of biblical sites and classical and Fgyptian antiquities, But the portrayal of Islamic and contemporary Egypt was not overlooked. The latter included six plates devoted entirely or partly to Nubians or Abyssinians ~ indigenous A mre the images of Egypt most familiar in Victorian Britain were David Roberts's men and women, as well as captive slaves. ‘These were among the earliest images specifically of black Africans in Egypt by a British amtst to become widely avalable to the public, although earlier publications by eighteenth- century artist-travellers, such as Richard Dalton, had included representations of Nubian or Abyssinian slaves for example, Ethiopians on Fats coming down the Nile (Dalton, pl.XIV) - while James Bruce's Tamels to Discover the Source ofthe Nile fist published in 1790, had raised general awareness of the more remote areas of north-east Afica (see Conner, 8-9 and no. 12) Early in the nineteenth century, the massive Description de "Egypte, produced by French savantsBLACK VICTORIANS 36 berween 1809 and 1828, in the wake of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, included volumes on modem Egypt, bur better known in Britain was Vivant Denon's less unwieldy Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte (1802). Roberts (1796-1864) travelled to Egypt and Palestine in 1838-9, fullling a long-held ambition to draw ‘the scenes of sacred history and the antiquities of Egypt’ (See Llewellyn 1986, 69), and determined to out-do in accuracy earlier efforts, in particular the Description de Egypte. Arriving in Cairo in late September, he embarked on a three-month voyage up the Nile, His primary objectives were the ancient temples and tombs, but his journal reveals an almost equal personal interest in contemporary inhabitants and their way of life. Scattered through his observations on people and places are references to groups of slaves being transported down the Nile. At Asyut, the principal town in Middle Egypt, he saw “a numerous caravan of Slave dealers with their cargo, from the upper country, probably Sennaat’ At Aswan, he went to see a collection of slaves from Nuibia, which is indeed a most melancholy sight. They were principally boys and young women, who appeared ill and sickly. Twro were lying in afield, evidentally in the last stage of consumption. The men who were with them were good looking Nubians with the exception of one brutal looking fellow quite intoxicated, a most rare thing to see in this country. He was not black but his looks were equal to anything which the imagination could picture for such a character He persisted in following us about expecting we would purchase.” Roberts's comments plainly express disapproval ofthe trade. Ar Korti he noted the fear of the villagers, who fed when his party approached, due to traders who seized children to sell to “these inhuman trffices in flesh & blood’. Back in Asyut, he was plagued by the owner of a slave boat, “a hoary old villain’, who ‘drank my Coffee, smoked my pipe, my only pipe!, and bored me with questions not one out often could I understand ... confound hit and all slave merchants, say I from the bottom of my heart’. The slaves themselves however were ‘all the ‘most perfect of their kind 5 being of a dark copper colour and beautifully formed with fine expressive countenances, the other 6 were negros, all young and in their prime, their hair was plated as in Nubia but free from that villainous grease and the still more objectionable smell accompanying i’. Though confined to a small space and wearing filthy rags, their conditions seemed less hontfic than ‘the same trade, infemal trade, on the Westem coast of Africa’. The boat with its cargo, pictorially relocated to a spot further down the Nile, is represented in the lithograph entitled View on the Nile looking towards the Pyramids of Dashour and Saccara Roberts, Eaypt 6 Nubia, 1, p14. In the bazaars of Asyut, among a bewildering ‘motley crowd’, Roberts saw ‘a group of black women, naked from the waist upwards’, who were ‘sleek and plump” slaves from Senaar, accompanied by ‘fine tall blacks half naked like the women and without turbans, black but the head and features independant of colour might pass for Grecian, ~ these are the slaveOBSERVATIONS AND INTERPRETATION merchants. They recommend you their goods, you may have the best for 20 dollars’ Sensitive not only to the differing characteristics of those he encountered, Robens also wryly noted their own reaction to him. The girls in the market and the slaves in the boat ‘tttered and seemed much amused at what must afterall appear to them a ridiculous dress’. As Roberts was not yet wearing Arab garments, he sported a straw hat, @ French blouse and ‘the usual narrow coverings of the lower extremities which after a Turk's yard wide ones must appear scanty enough’. While curious as to Nubian habits, especially their style of cleansing and ‘greasing themselves, and surprised by their small hands ~ ‘altho’ black they were delicate’ — he was also sufficiently aware oftheir humanity to perceive their corresponding curiosity and response to his own peculiar appearance. He also expressed a benign, if commonplace, attitude towards the two “trusty Nubians’ in his crew of eight, who were “most faithful and assiduous ... I believe they would go through anything co serve me’. Both Roberts's comments and the images of black Africans that he later published reflect attitudes to other races and cultures widely held by Westerners at the time, The most prominent current issue in Britain was slavery, following final emancipation in the colonies in 1838, the publication of William Wilberforce's Lie and Corespandence, the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840 and the well-known Abolitionist sentiments of Vietoria and Alber. Having abolished slavery in its own realms, Britain tured its attention to other areas, including Egypt, where in 1837-8 a governmental fact-finding mission made investigations and representations on slave trading to Muhammad Ali, Pasha of Egypt, through the consul- ‘general, Colonel Patrick Campbell. Roberts, whose journal mentions Campbell several times 37BLACK VICTORIANS 3 in December 1838, must have been aware of these moves, which may have influenced his decision to include images relating to the trade in Egypt among his published lithographs. As well as the slave boat, these included Abyssinian Slaves resting at Korti ~ Nubia (Cat.80) and In the Slave Market at Cairo (Fig,9). That the trade did continue and was indeed regarded, with mixed fascination and abhorrence, as part ofthe colourful lie of contemporary Egypt, is clear from the observations of many travellers One of these was William Miller (1812-45), a young professional artist from Bristol, who happened to be in Egypt atthe same time as Roberts, though neither artist seems to have been aware of the other's presence. Voyaging up the Nile as far as Luxor, Maller recorded his impressions in a sketch- and note-book (Greenacte and Stoddard, no.94) and later edited them for publication. In print, he articulated the mixture of painterly excitement and moral revulsion aroused by the Cairo slave market, one of his "most favourite haunts’ (One enters this building, which is situated in a quarter the most dark, ditty, and obscure of any at Cairo, by a sort of lane ~ then one arrives at some large gates. ‘The marker is held in an open court, surrounded with arches of the Roman. character In the centre of this court the slaves are exposed for sale, and in general to the number of from thirty to fory — neatly all young, many quite infants. The scene is of a revolting nature, yet I did not see, as | expected, the dejection and sorrow | was led to imagine. (Art Union, Sep 1839, 131) ‘While he thought the Abyssinians beautiful, he expressed only disgust for the negresses, ‘for their hair is loaded with two or three pounds ofa sort of tallow fat, literally in thick masses; and as this is influenced by the heat of the su, it gradually melts over the body, and the stench from itis disgusting in the extreme, yet in this place did | feel more delight than any ‘other part of Cairo; the groups and the extraordinary costume can but please the artist’ (Ant Union, Sep 1839, 131-2). Since a variety of colour and nations could easily be found in the other bazaars and streets of Cairo, Mller’s artistic enthusiasm at the sight of half-naked women is perhaps questionable. His revulsion seems directed at the condition of the Individuals rather than the traffic of which they were vietims. The same concems are evident in his sketches and paintings of the slave market: dispassionate and non-judgemental, the focus is on colour, atmosphere and ‘truth to nature” (Cat-73). Whatever his views on abolition, Miller was keen to distance himself from emotionally charged and deliberately polemical stage-pieces such as William Allan's The Slaw Market, Constantinople (1838; NGS, pl.6) where a villainous black slave-dealer separates an innocent white woman from her husband. Nevertheless, it may not be coincidental that Miller exhibited four slave-marker pictures in London at a time when anti-slavery was at the forefront of public consciousness and when paintings by Bard (Cat.18) and Tumer at the RA were hot topics of discussion. Roberts's images of slave trading, while not deployed! in an exhibition picture — he recognised his limitations as a figure painter ~ are equally detached, documenting the facts, as he saw them, rather than appealing to viewers’ emotions,OBSERVATIONS AND INTERPRETATION Nearly a decade later, writer Harriet Martineau (1802-76), passionately active in the cause of anti-slavery, made a similar Nile joumey. At Aswan, she watched a group of slaves and also compared their conditions favourably with those in America Most of the gris were grinding miller berween two stones, or kneading or baking, cakes. They were freshly oiled, in good plight, and very inteligent-looking, for the ‘most part. Some of them were really prety, in their way, in che old Egyptian way. They appeared cheerful, and at home in their business; and there can scarcely be a stronger contrast than between this slave-market and those I had seen in the United States. (Martineau, 48-9) Nevertheless, Martineau declared slavery in Egypt to be ‘no more defensible here than elsewhere’ Martineau’s liberal views, it must be noted, did not prevent her judging the girls’ features as only ‘pretty in their way’, Like most travellers, she shared the prevailing European view. ‘An eatlier group of visitors, observing black women in the Cairo slave market, acknowledged that the English perception of beauty was conditioned by Westem partialties: ‘Shown one woman who was considered a great beauty ... but owing probably to our prejudice against her complexion we could not admire her altogether’ (Rowley-Conwy et al, 116). Later a subile change of attitude was revealed when a female member ofthe pany, describing the two wives, one black, one white, of an ‘Italian medical man’, wrote: ‘you will hardly believe that ‘we are all agreed in thinking black the prettiest colour & are rather disgusted at the sight of ‘washy Europeans. I wish we could make others of the same opinion on our return’ (Rowley- Conwy etal, 116). ‘Among Africans, prevailing opinion favoured the features of Nubians, as the text (© Roberts's lithograph Nubian Women at Korie, on the Nile explains: ‘Though the Nubian women are dark in their complexions even to blackness, they have nothing else that should class them with Negroes; on the contrary, their features are finely formed, and even Greek in character ‘The same text later notes the similarity of the women’s headdresses to those of the ancient Egyptians. Another plate, Colosus in front of Temple at Wady Saboua ~ Nubia, makes a similar comparison between the strong physique of male Nubian warriors and two mighty ancient Egyptian statues at Wady Sabua, where Robers uses his artistic licence — not for the only time = to re-erect one of the statues in order to drive home the analogy. Others too connected Egypt's ancient peoples with its living population; indeed, many travellers visited the Near Fast primarily in search of the roots of their own civilisation ‘The descriptions of feature and dress accompanying Robert's lithographs, including the Group of Nubians ~ Wadi Kardassy (Cat.79), are evidence of the ethnographic interest in and desire to document the variety of costumes and customs that became more pronounced as the century wore on. Whether this eagemess to classify is evidence of an imperialist impulse to control and possess or, more benignly interpreted, of an incentive better to understand the characteristics of different races and creeds. is a point of debate, More relevant here isthe 39BLACK VICTORIANS 40 often acute observation by many travellers of the (to them) very alien characteristics of Egypt's black population. In this they took their cue from the most popular nineteenth-century compendium of contemporary Egyptian life, E.W. Lane’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). Lane (1801-76) spent many years living in Cairo, parlly in Ottoman style, and knew several prominent Egyptian intellectuals as well as expatriate Egyptologists and orientalists. He was thus well placed to make a thorough observation of the complex structure of Cairene society and to detail the roles of black men and women ~ servants and slaves, for the most part ~ within this, The numerous illustrations in Lane’s book became a reference point for many artists Miller's Prayers in the Deser (1843; BMAG) Greenacre and Stoddard, Fig.10) and William Holman Hunt's Afterglow in Egypt (Cat.63) ae just two examples of postures and types derived from Lane’s imagery. The most significant early Victorian artist to adopt both the letter and spirit of Lane's work was, however, John Frederick Lewis (1804-76) (see M. Lewis; Llewellyn 2000; Weeks). Amiving in Egypt in late 1841, unique among British artists in the nineteenth century, Lewis remained in Cairo for a decade, immersing himself in the Egyptian way of life and associating with many of the same individuals, both native and foreign, as Lane. Little detail of Lewis's life in Cairo is known, but the scanty references in surviving correspondence Indicate bis acquaintanceship with Lane and intention to compile a visual record of the Egyptian people, possibly to match what Lane had achieved in print.” ‘Among the racially and socially diverse peoples Lewis sketched in Cairo and later incorporated into his paintings are several dark-skinned men and women, Most are either Nubian or Abyssinian, others are Bedouin Arabs or Egyptian felahin. Many years later. the critic John Ruskin, who rated Lewis second only to Tumer among British artists, recognised his ability to differentiate between ethnic types: ‘Lewis saw in men and women only the most beautiful of living creatures, and painted them as he did dogs and deer, but with a perception of their nature and race which laughs to scom all the generic study of the scientific schools’ (Ruskin, 405). The reference to animal painting reminds us, however, of the prevailing belief in the inferior intellectual capacity of non-European and especially dark-skinned people. To ‘what extent Lewis stood outside this trend is open to argument, but interpretation of his Images is by no means straightforward, His scenes are an amalgam of authentic elements, idealisaions of reality rather than records of actual events, but the apparent superficiality that Ruskin perceived in his figures is often belied by subtle arrangements of posture, gesture and glance. At the same time, Lewis seemed unwilling to confront head-on some of the uglier social issues in Egypt that other visitors noted, such as slavery (he depicted no slave markets cr slave boats) and enforced labour (One of the half-dozen sketches of Nubians listed in Lewis's posthumous sale may be the ssudy for the Pipe Bearer (Fig.10).* Seen in profile, possibly to display the receding cranium and jutting jaw commonly associated with the stereotype of Aftican physiognomy, his black skin is emphasised by the whiteness of his Jacket, This seems a direct allusion to David Wilkie’s The Dragoman of Mr Allison at Pera (1840), which Lewis is likely to have seen in Constantinople in 1840-1 (Blayney-Brown, no.62; Llewellyn 2003, 624-31), since LewisOBSERVATIONS AND INTERPRETATION ‘was a fervent admirer of Wilkie, who had recently died on his way back to Britain, Willie's figure also wears @ white robe - with sleeves hitched up for work, emphasising his position as a servant ~ as a contrast to his black face and arms. Behind Lewis's main figure is a less clearly defined black head, whose pose and features bear a remarkable resemblance to Wilkie’s dragoman. In addition to homage, Lewis's motive in including the two different heads may have been to show that there was more than one type of black physiognomy. Both artists employed the pictonal device of the juxtaposition of black and white, but not 1 the conventional trope of so many later orientalist paintings, by Jean-Leon Géréme and others, where muscular negresses act as counteroils to soft whi skinned women, within the confines of bath or harem. Neither Lewis nor Wilkie was drawn into this hhackneyed iconography. Wilkie’s Negro Nurse (Cat.104) is a very different kind of image to the similar subject, depicted by Frederick Goodall’s The New Light in the Harem (Cat54). Wilkie's nurse's black face contrasts with her white headdress and infant in her charge. But the tendemess of her embrace, unaflectedly portrayed by her bent-up knees and bowed head, enabling her to enfold the tiny child in her arms, eschews the stereotype. She is a servant, but the family for whom she works clearly hold her in a position of rust and familiarity (Thompson, n0.69). ‘The relationship of the figures in Lewis's shonder Bey and his Servant also goes beyond that of master and servant. The fairskinned young son of Soleiman Pasha, formerly a French officer in the service of Muhammad Ali, is attended by a Nubian boy, whose black skin and red costume are thrown into relief by the strong patch of white representing sunlight on the pattemed wall (Fine Ar Society, London, spring 1997, no.4). The starus of each is clear, but the Nubian’s upright stance and reflective expression mark him out as an individual concemed for the welfate of his companion. In his later image of The Pipe Bearer (Cat.65), painted in Britain in 1856, Lewis makes ‘more concession to conventional stereotypes than in the sketch. Here the black servant is juxtaposed with his white master, shown full-face, who stands immediately behind him. Placed below the white man in the picture plane, the pipe bearer is clearly in a position of subservience yet, while he looks up, confident in the role he plays, his companion, with downcast eyes, awaits his pipe introspectively. At one level the rich textiles and patterned architectural features reinforce the Avabian Nights stereotype, the ‘languid Lotus-eater’ who “BLACK VICTORIANS 2 lives the ‘dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life’ Thackeray ascribed to Lewis (Thackeray, 146, 143). At another, each figure, the black no less than the white, is presented as a self-contained individual, and we are made aware of the possibilities of subtle nuances in their relationship, The ‘master’, his features similar to those in A Syrian Sheik (1856, Fitzwilliam Museum) is probably a portrayal of Lewis himself, and the ‘pipe-bearer’ is possibly his own servant from the large 'many-windowed, many galleried house” Lewis inhabited in Cairo As recent literature on Lewis has shown, his orientalist pictures, most painted after his return to Britain, are often subtle and complex constructions, with multilayered, ‘metaphorical meanings and references to wide-ranging issues of society, race and. gender (See Llewellyn 2000; Weeks; Williams). It is therefore not surprising that ambiguity sometimes characterises the black males and females in his images as much as the white. The majority, chough not all, are domestic slaves or servants, but they play varying roles within the narratives of the pictures, reflecting Lane's observation that: ‘in some respects [servants] are often familiar in their manners to their master, even laughing and joking with him, in others they are very submissive, paying him the ummost honour’ (Lane, 168). While the black and dark-brown (Nubian and AbyssiniatvEthiopian?) servants of the Persian prince in A Starling Account (1863, V&A) (Llewellyn 2003, 624-5) have a clear-cut household role, like the boy in Wilkie’s depiction of the same potentate (Aberdeen Art Gallery; Wilkie 1846, no.16), the status of the black males in several of Lewis's outdoor scenes is less obvious. ‘A prominent figure in the foreground of the late, oil version of A Cairo Bazaar, the Dellal (1875) Gotheby's, 12 Jun 2003, lot 29), is a well-dressed boy, sitting at his ease against a carpet-hung mastaba, one of a crowd watching the broker display his wares. He holds a cloth purse, but itis not clear whether he is attached to the broker, or to the women examining the textiles, oF to no one. Servant or not, his relaxed attitude implies a confidence in the position he holds. Ina sketch for this painting he is named Abdul Hadi (Christie's, 4-7 May 1877, lot 373). The same boy appears, in the same attitude, among the men in the audience surrounding the musical storytellers in The Bezestein Bazaar of El Khan Khalili, Cairo (1872) ‘(Christie's New York, 31 Oct 2001, lot 14). Though his identity is unclear ~ an inhabitant of Cairo, a domestic servant or a model used by Lewis in Britain — his individuality is not in question, Other dark-skinned males appear within the ethnic and social mix in both these bazaar paintings — notably the musicians in the Bezestein and the richly dressed Nubian in the Deal ~ not as picturesque adjuncts to the composition, but playing a significant part im the central narrative, on an equal footing to the lighter-skinned protagonists. The role of some of the black and dark-brown females in Lewis's interiors is equally uncertain, After an absence of nine years, Lewis exhibited at the Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1850 with an astonishing tour de force of space, light and colour, entitled The Hhareem. A complex scene, it strikes at the heart of Westem fascination with the East: the activities behind the closed doors of the haram (Benjamin, no.24; Yeazell 221-30). As the artist explained in 1853 (RSA 1853, no.494), a new Abyssinian slave in the haram of a Mamluk bey is being unveiled, lke a prize animal, by a tall black eunuch. Their dark skins contrast with the china-doll white of the three existing wives reclining by the pink-cheekedOBSERVATIONS AND INTERPRETATION bey as he leans forward to inspect his new acquisition. Their suspicion of the new arrival is as. evident as his eager anticipation, intensified, perhaps, by her alien origins. Equally clear-cut ate the young Nubian boy carrying the hookah and the veiled slave-dealer's wife, representing ‘her husband who could not enter another man’s haram, More puzzling however is the dark, laughing girl, standing slightly off-centre, who, with che other three darkeskinned figures in shadow, forms a foil to the whiteskinned figures in full light. Described as ‘an old inmate’, she is perhaps amused at the sight of a fellow Abyssinian joining the household and the consequent repercussions, but her own status is not cleat. Is she wife, concubine or slave? Is she, in reality, Lewis's ‘black cook, who has done the pilaff, and stuffed the cucumbers’ and whose ‘beautiful, enormous, ogling, black eyes’ attracted Thackeray's attention (Thackeray, 143, 146)? Not for the last time in Lewis's work, on this and other issues of reality — not least the veracity of a scene that the artist could have pieced together from real elements but not have actually witnessed ~ the viewer is left in suspense, marvelling at the construction but intrigued by the narative. The same questions are posed by the black git in a later, undated oil, The Harem (BMAG). Holding a mirror, she kneels before the elegant white woman reclining on the divan, but itis not clear whether she is a domestic slave, servant or concubine. The status of the black girl in The Arab Scribe (Fig.11), exhibited in 1852 and engraved in 1858 (AJ, 1858, 43), is even more ambivalent. With her face, unveiled, offset by her white headdress, she and her veiled ‘white companion watch while the bearded mull interrupts his study of the Koran to write a note for them. Are they mistress and maid, nwo wives, oF wife and slave concubine from a haram? Why is one unveiled in the presence of a man? Is he penning an illicit love-etter for them, or acting in his official capacity as writer of petitions? And who is the mysterious male figure dimly seen behind the mashrabiyya window? Whatever answers may be suggested, and whether or not it reinforces Wester notions of female illiteracy inthe East, Lewis has created for a Wester audience a highly crafted and vivid illusion of an omental interior, and deliberately kept us guessing as to the precise story. He makes conscious reference to Willie's The Turkish Letter Writer (1840) (Stevens, no.121) but deepens the intrigue by giving his own painting a more ambiguous title and substituting a black girl for Wilkie’s second white. This black girl, with her lively, intelligent expression, is no bystander, but a central focus of the narrative. A dark-skinned figure is also at the centre of A Turkish School in the vicinity of Cairo (1865) Gee Stevens, no.93). He is an Abyssinian oF Egyptian fllah boy among a group of ethnically vatied but richly dressed boys and girls being taught the Kor'an by an elderly shaykh. This image too is a marvellous construction of rich textures, dappled light and interplay of gestures and glances, to which the exquisitely described people, animals and objects all contribute. The reality of the setting, the conjunction of both sexes leaming together and the appropriateness of the ‘props’ have all been questioned* but of particular interest in the present context is the prominent dark boy with blue jacket and red turban, eamestly leaming his piece. Behind him a Nubian boy also listens attentively, That a black boy reciting to his venerable mentor was central to the conception of the composition is clear from a sketch in 0BLACK VICTORIANS “6 which these are the sole figures. Whatever other nuances of meaning Lewis intends, and however idealised his construct, he is perhaps demonstrating the intellectual equality of races. Such sentiments were unambivalently expressed by Lucie Duff Gordon, a remarkable ‘woman who lived in Luxor in the 1860s and whose poignant comespondence was published as Letters from Egypt (1865). Her rejection of blanket racial categories is just one example of her ‘understanding, ‘I myself have seen at least five sorts of blacks (Negroes, not Arabs) more unlike each other than Swedes are unlike Spaniards; and many are just like ourselves,” she wrote. ‘I am fully convinced that custom and education are the only teal differences between ‘one set of men and another, their inner nature isthe same all the world over" (quoted Rees, 100). ‘Among travel artists, Wilkie and Lewis were not alone in observing ethnic diversity. Car! Haag (1820-1915) spent 18 months in Egypt and Syria in 1858-60. He made excursions into the desert and lived for some time with a Bedouin tribe. Among numerous sketches of local life and landscape are single named figures, including Abd Allah one of Agile Agha’s Bedaween,Fatime of Abul, Sid Mohamad of Dongola, Hassan the Nubian (Dreweatt Neate, lots 84, 116, 125, 135) and Hassan a Fllah Boy of Upper Egypt (Cat.56). Whether sketches on the spot cor more considered works for exhibition in London, these images demonstrate Haag’s concem (co differentiate between ethnic types, to pinpoint origins and to portray physiognomy. They are paralleled by a slightly earlier series of images by Amadeo, Count Preziosi, a Maltese artist living in Istanbul and working for che Westem market, whichOBSERVATIONS AND INTERPRETATION represent men and women from all over the Ottoman Empire, and include Ibrahim, a Muslim from Sennar and Abdul Gazi from Egypt (Llewellyn and Newton, 15-17, 43-50). Itis possible 10 regard both groups as an exotic collection of scientific specimens, presented as curiosities for a Wester audience, but each artist has attempted ro define che particular as well as ethnic characteristics of each individual. On his return to England, prevailing opinion and market forces encouraged Haag to generalise and often to idealise his Easter subjects. The figure with his chibouk against a background of camels, travellers and skeletons (Cat.57), is presented as a‘man of the desert’ rather than a particular individual. His features are notably similar 0 those ofa differently attire figure identified as ‘An Egyptian Hadi’. (Dreweatt Neate, lot 102), but his characteristics have not yet been so thoroughly subsumed in the moral dimension as the figures in The Swooping Teror ofthe Desert (1873) and ocher melodramatic or sentimental confections. While Frederick Goodall was on occasion able to present strongly characterised individuals, the majority of the ‘Eastern’ images painted after his trip to Egypt are typical Victorian genre subjects, presented in an orientalist idiom. Like Haag’s pictures, they were adied for their ‘truthfulness’ as “faithful representations’ of their subject, but The Song ofthe Nubian Slave (Cat.55) and, to an even greater extent, The New Light in the Harem (Cat.54) are both elegant but essentially artificial scenes that reinforced Western mythologies of the East in general and of its black inhabitants in particular. Even at the time the thoroughly Westem character of the latter was recognised. By this stage in the century, market forces, prompted by hardening prejudices and successful imperialism, dictated a demand for more generalised, anodyne images of black Africans, instead of the more precise documentation that had arisen from the direct observation by artists in earlier decades. Although both Goodall and Haag retumed to Egypt in the 1870s, their later work does not reflect a deeper understanding of the ethnic diversity of the Egyptian nation, but rather the reverse. The unfamiliar culture and shifting realities of Egypt thet artists and writers had glimpsed on their travels were too complex to be translated into images now acceptable to the exhibition-going public. Instead, reconstructions of ancient Egypt and sentimental scenes of domestic virtue, in which black figures appeared servile or secondary, became popular, and there was no public attempt to confront the disturbing actuality of contemporary Egypt. | the complex publishing history of he velumess dete in Abbey: Pae numbers gen hee Lllow ABbey 2 This and ellowing quotations ae fore Raber ‘Eastern Journal, 1838-9, 2 vol, Navonl Libary of Sco, ‘Acc. 7223/1 uansbed and amended by Rebers’ daughter Christine. Lam graft an Brown for checking the ‘tanseriptons orginally made by the ste Helen Gtiteman and for permission to quote: Fer more on Rabens in "yp, See Guiterman and Llewelyn; Conner: Hendin, 3 1am gael 0 Jason Thompson, author ofa forhcoring biography of Lane fr alening me to he connection 4 Possibly A Nubian Boy canyinga Hoskab’ i Lewis's sae, Chast's, 4-7 May 1877, ot 316 5 Chas Newor's departmental catalogue notes or the watercolour veson, Vieiona and Albert Museum, epore these ses 4sVENUS AFRICAINE: RACE, BEAUTY AND AFRICAN-NESS Charmaine Nelson ‘months in Algeria in the mid-1850s on a state mission which had everything to do with colonial ideals of race and their preservation as art — an exploration of ans ‘ethnographic potential. Although produced before his 1856 tip, Cordier’s Vénus Africaine (1851; Fig 12) exemplifies the type of work he would create, sculptures which were types of racialised (and significantly) colonised peoples presumed to be on the verge of extinction or at least amalgamation precipitated by miscegenation. In view of his art as an ethnographic and arguably scientific tool, the Vénus Africaine is also interesting for what the ttle promises yet fails to deliver, a failure that signals the possibility of meanings which transcend the narow colonial understandings of black femaleness in nineteenth-century France. ‘The black female subject has a strained relationship to the history of Westem visual ar frequently represented, yet often as an abject sexual and racial body, the polar opposite of the idealised white female subject. With art produced after the European colonisation of Aftica, ‘we are dealing with aesthetic and material traditions invested in the racialisation of bodies and bound up with the hierarchisation of race and the concomitant idealisation of whiteness found also in medicine and the human sciences. A major difference benween these fields and C= Cordier (1827-1905), the French sculptor of polychrome works, spent sixthe visual arts, however, is the arts’ commitment to ideals of beauty. Within the logic of patriarchal societies where men stood for rationality and the mind, women came to stand for irrationality and the body. In Wester thought the association of women with the body also served to align them with the Beautiful, adomain for male heterosexual fulfilment and intellectual contemplation. But beauty in Westem thought has been understood, often soley, as white female beauty. When race became visible corporeal fact, this notion of beauty, hand in hand with white superiority generally, served t0 ‘expel black bodies ftom the possibilty of aesthetic wholeness, Few white scholars and artists recognised cultural relativity in the same manner as William Hogarth who, as Partha Mitter observes, while using blacks as ‘the other and witness to the depravity in English society that he wished to expose through his engravings’ (Mister, 44), nonetheless conceded that ‘the Negro who finds great beauty in the black Females of his country, may find as much deformity in the European beauty as we see in theirs’ (Hogarth, 114). ‘The marginalisation of black women in the colonial West means that black female subjects in art must be understood within the material, aesthetic and thematic limitations imposed upon them, and the nineteenth century occupies a specific historical context, The far-reaching European practice of transatlantic slavery, extending to setter colonies such as Canada and slave havens in the Caribbean and elsewhere, renders essential the consideration of slavery, Abolitionism and emancipation. Put simply, black female and male subjects frequently entered Westem art through themes involving the representation of enslaved or free blacks. Black ‘women were grieving or distraught slave mothers, kneeling or Deseeching slaves or asexualised ‘mammies', rather than noble mythological figures or queenly allegories, The Black Venus or Aftican Venus then is a tue puzzle: a revered Western mythological figure, the goddess of love, with definite connotations of beauty and Antiquity, yet Africar/black and therefore, by the racial definitions of Western colonialism, antithetical to all that was thought beautiful. ‘A nineteenth-century Venus requires both an understanding of ancient mythology, and its understanding within Westem modemity, As Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott argue, “Classical gods are not so much metaphors, in early modem and modem culture, as signs of metaphoricity itself. This is doubly so in the case of Venus because she is aligned, through a notion of beaury, with art, and perhaps because she is aligned, through a notion of sexual congress, with reproduction’ (Arscott and Scott, 19). Venus in the nineteenth-century West marks @ meeting of pagan mythology and European Christian morality. Venus was the embodiment of the Beautiful, but a ‘true’ beauty beyond the reach of mortal decay. However, VENUS AFRICAINE ”BLACK VICTORIANS 48 she was simultaneously understood as arbitrary, cruel, wily and deceptive. Venus was thus a precarious anistic subject, simultaneously providing a raison d'étre for the female nude and licensing sexual desire through unintellectual contemplation of the female body. Venus was a potential moral trap, especially in sculpture: ‘The Venus motif in early modern and modem art cannot help but maintain a reference to these classical arcefacts, even when there is not a forceful visual resemblance. This strongly marked cultural authority of the Venuses produces a curious situation in which it is impossible to deploy Venus as a subject like any other subject for art because the objectness of these classical sculptures intnides. (Arscott and Scott, 3) Objectness is particularly important to discussion of Cordier’s Venus Afriaine because of its distinct aesthetic and material properties as a polychrome sculpture, at a moment in the nineteenth century when uncoloured neoclassicism was an equal if not stronger artistic force in Europe. Race, as materialised within polychromy for a black female subject, must be addressed together with the Issues of sexuality and lave implicit in the ideal of Venus, ‘Venus is a goddess, after all, and her powers cannot be resisted by the mere will of mortals. The fantasy is of irresistible, engulfing effect that sets asceticism and self-denial aside’ (Arscott and Scott, 6) But what happens when sexual promise is located in a black body? Black feminisms depend upon an understanding of intersectionality and identity; that is, a sex/gender posi is inextricable from a race/colour position (See Collins; James and Busia). So to explore the ramifications of a black Venus is not just to explore a shift in race/colour but to acknowledge that any shift in the racial location of any-body provokes new readings and meanings for the sex and gender identification of that body. Patriarchal and colonial discourses of the body and sexuality, which dictated the patemalistic protection of the white female as the mother of the supposedly superior white race, also ensured that white women subjects were normally allocated to the realm of the nude, representing the ‘higher’ moral ideal; the space where the unclothed body could legitimately be consumed through supposedly exclusive intellectual contemplation. The category of the naked was much more problematic. Rather than a traditional allegorical or mythical figure such as Venus, the naked female subject was often a specific individual, a ‘real’ identifiable woman, whose body conveyed social, historical and biological specificity. Her lack of clothing was precisely that, a very transgressive lack, as opposed to the supposedly natural, always ready stace of the nude subject. I have discussed elsewhere forms of sexual disguise used by Wester artists to mediate the sexualisation ofthe female body as the nude/naked, to justify the unclothed body and transform it into the nude, allowing such representations to inhabit the realm of high art rather than pornography (Nelson, 1997). The categories I have outlined were nineteenth-century staples of the nude, They include the sleeping or dying woman; voyeurism, often delivered to the viewer by way of environmental distraction withinthe artwork in the form of the female subject at her toilette; allegory, e.g. Venus, nymphs; and nature, or the female body as metaphor for nature. The last, most overlooked category is race, in this case blackness. ‘These elaborate representational strategies were fundamentally a means of extemalising the sexual gaze, expelling it from the idealised bedy and imagined soul of the white female subject and projecting responsibilty for sexual desire onto the implied male heterosexual viewer. A Venus or sea nymph was permitted a higher degree of sexualisation precisely because she was not a “real” woman, But such conventions are strikingly absent from the examples of nnaked/nude black female subjects found throughout the history of Western art, precisely because of black women’s abject sexual and racial position. The multiple marginalisation ensured that black women were defined as sexually different from white women, a difference identified as a licentiousness; excessive, pathological sexuality. Already positioned outside ‘normal’ sexuality coded as white, black women were seen to need no protection or device to ‘mediate their semualisaion in art. A black Venus thus becomes an interesting category, which ‘must be discussed in relation not only to the specific allegory and its myths and the history of the nude in Westem art, but also to dominant colonial ideals of race that prevailed at the time of production and reception. Ironically, some of the ‘negative’ character traits traditionally assigned to the mythological white female subject seem all too fitting stereotypical properties ascribed to the black female subject. T Denean Sharpley Whiting’s compelling observations on the representation of black ‘women in French culture may usefully extend to other felds: ‘In his desire to illumine the dark continent of black femaleness, of racial and sexual alterity, che French male writer constructs an image that is captured in at least one particular and predominant narrative: Black Venus’ (Sharpley-Whiting, 6). Black Venus was created in the collective colonial imagination by reference to primitive narratives which positioned black women as racial and sexual ‘others’. She is a site of competing and contradictory sensation, provoking both fear and desire, attraction and repulsion, and thereby registering the experience of anxiety. The Black Venus is ‘attractive’ to white men precisely because of her racial difference, which is experienced as sexual ‘Otherness’ and danger. Yet simultaneously this cultivated difference threatens the stability and ideality of the white (male) body. To understand this paradox, we must recognise that pleasure is not neatly aligned with desire as absence of danger and maintenance of physical integrity, but that colonial pleasure, as structured through the ‘mastering gaze/pen of the white (male) body, lies in the possibility of chaos, the splitting of the subject and the titillation which danger through proximity to the black body provokes. Thus, ‘the Black Venus narrative is part of the larger discourse of Afrcanism in general, and French Aficanism in particulat Sexusl and racial differences inspire acute fears in the French male psyche. Fear is sublimated or screened through desire to master or know this difference, resulting in the production of eroticized/exoticized narratives of truths’ (Sharpley: Whiting, 7). Venus's potential for sexual transgression is that which marries so well with her incamations as black in the Western imagination. Cordier’s Venus could join the ranks of both Sara Bartmann (best known by the racist moniker ‘Hottentot Venus’), arguably an example of VENUS AFRICAINE. 9ALACK VICTORIANS 50 the worst of the inhumane mistreatment of black people within colonial exhibition practices Gee Willis and Williams), and Josephine Baker, the African-American entertainer and star of Parisian café-concerts in the 1920s and 1930s (see Archer-Straw), Each in her own moment .was a black woman whose sexual ‘Othemess’ was cultivated and exploited by whites for white titillation.’ And yet they were women, while Cordier's Ves Africaine, although derived in part from the contemplation of individual African women, was an art object. Hitherto, [have written as ifthe terms ‘African’ and ‘black’ were interchangeable. Yet the assumption is problematic: Africa is and was in the nineteenth century a continent with diverse groups of people. The efforts of European philosophical and scientific thought to categorise these groups was part of the colonial process which paradoxically resulted in their homogenisation as ‘African’ even while the same systems strove to document heterogeneity. ‘The diversity of populations was also a conundrum for the Westem imagination since colonial discourse sought to define racial types in part through geographical location. Europe was the hhome of the supposed Caucasoid race, Asia that of the Mongoloid and Africa of the Negroid. However, the visible differences between Norther and Southem Africans, not to mention other distinctions, called for explanation. Egypt ~ which Cordier visited in 1866, producing busts of ‘Arabs’, ‘Abyssinians’ and fellahin — proved a particular problem for Western human ‘scientists, unable to agree on the race of its inhabitants (see Cuvier; Knox; Prichard 1851). ‘Within the colonial order of imperial geographies, Egypt represented either the pre-eminent African civilisation of, to the die-hard Eurocentnst, the only African civilisation, a belief ‘manifested in allegorical representations of ‘Aftica’ which depended on symbolic and cultural reference to Fgypt and a white-negro body. Egypt's geographical and racial proximity to ‘Western whiteness gave its people a privileged racial position which sometimes categorised them as Coucasian rather than Negroid; Cleopatra's Egyptian-ness, for example, held the possibilty of a racially hybnd body at once a marginal site of whiteness and a superior form of blackness. Throughout the nineteenth century, Western exploration and classification of blackness and Alrican-ness was in terms of degrees of colour and proximity ro whiteness, 50 that physical and geographical distance ffom Europe came to stand for moral, intellectual, sexual and colour distance, and through those bodies whose colour, physiognomnies and anatomies were seen as most divergent from the white ideal, Europe constituted its ‘Other’ as Alcan and black, The visual arts were an essential element in normalising colonial ideals of blackness. “ ‘At the same time, the white marble medium of neoclassical sculpture had been elevated into an ideal, As Edouard Papet states, ‘the discovery of antique polychrome architecture and sculpture launched one of the nineteenth-cencury’s most controversial debates on esthetics" (Musée ’Orsay, 51). From the eighteenth century, French aesthetic authorities had deemed colour a seductive distraction, a simulation of reality that impaired the ‘beauty’, ‘grace’, ‘purity’ and ‘nobility’ of white neoclassical sculpture (see Drost, 63~4), As well as colour, the Issue was illusion and integrity of material practice. Painting’s use of colour and perspectival systems to give flat canvas the illusion of three-dimensional space was deemed ‘untruthful’ compared to the supposed ‘truth’ of marble’s tangible and voluminous whiceness. So, as onepainter complained in 1847, the ‘exaltation of sculpture above painting’ had made painters “but an inferior grade of artists" (cited in Gardner, 15). The elimination of colour, except for whiteness, was seen as a means to purge sensuelism from the subject and ensure a morally sound object. It was also a means to achieve a level of abstraction that denied specificity of biological detail. Although in fact a rediscovery of knowledge rejected or suppressed by scholars like Wineklemann and others, nineteenth-century sculptors were aware that the marble prototypes by their classical predecessors had once been suffused with coloured pigment (Drost, 62). Their decision to work in white marble signifies a conscious ideological choice This was transmitted to cultural tourists and art critics. The account by writer Nathaniel Hawthome, who wis in Rome at the height of neoclassical production, of the studio of sculptor Thomas Crawford, captures the spiritual and moral implications of marble's symbolic value: ‘Ie is rather sad to think that Crawford died before he could see his ideas in the marble, where they gleam with so pure and celestial a light as compared with the plaster,’ he wrote “There is as much difference as between flesh and spirit’ (Hawthorne, I, 157). This distinction points up the regulatory function of marble in Hawthorne's eyes: embodying the power to transfomn the biological human body into a work of art with moral merit ~ or rather to deny the flesh and celebrate the spirit. Critic James Jackson Jarves, who in fact thought painting the more elevated artform, explicitly addressed the use of colour in nude sculpture. ‘Much doubt ‘exists as to the propriety of rendering the nude figure,’ he wrote. Its chief claim was upon the intellect add colour, however, and upon the universal principle of nature in its use, feeling is at once touched; it must of course be combined according to the law ‘of harmony. A gilt or a bronze statue arouses no emotion beyond intellectual admiration; any artificial employment of colour, such as tinting marble, strikes the mind disagreeably as falsification of the material without any adequate motive. ‘We look to sculpture for form alone; if it attempt more it becomes painful as 4 Violation of its primary truth; indeed, 1 believe for sculpture itself, as confined to the human figure, that the intellectual pleasure diminishes in the degree that pure white is departed from as its material. Does any one find other pleasure in the artistic freaks of the classical ages, and the imitations of the Renaissance in the shape of blackamoors, draperies, and occasionally separate features, rendered by the natural colours of their stone-material, than in the ingenuity ‘of these combinations? (Jarves, 66, 155-6) In this argument, whiteness is not accorded the value of colour, but is situated as a universal category ~ so much so that to alter the whiteness of marble is a ‘violation of primary truth’. The principal funtion of sculpture is form; colour, other than the uniform use of marble, bbronze or gilt, impedes intellectual consumption of the work. Tinted sculpture offered ‘emotive distraction experienced at the level of feeling; in other words it existed in the viewer's VENUS AFRICAINE 3BLACK VICTORIANS 32 body not mind. Labelling historical examples of polychromy as ‘artistic freaks’, Jarves moreover invokes Renaissance ‘blackamoors’ to simultaneously register and marginalise the expanded possibilities for racial signification which polychromy provided. Insistence on marble whiteness is also Eurocentric insistence on the universality of the white body as the aesthetic paradigm of beauty Another American commentator, Anne Brewster, declared that [plainted starues are repulsive to the modem eye and taste. Gibson's tinted one ... is @ ghastly thing, and it seems impossible for us modems to accept this practice of the ancients’ (Brewster, 197). The ‘ghastly ching’ ‘was John Gibson’s Tinted Venus (¢.1851-6) exhibited at the 1862 Intemational Exhibition in London and later at the Philadelphia Academy. Gibson’s subtle tinting of his marble Venus, achieved through hot wax and paint, recalled the flesh-colour of the white body, enacting a sexualisation in its palpable shife towards a “real” female body which disturbed many viewers (AJ, Jul 1862, 161; Kasson, 97; Young, 57, 98). In The Marble Faun (1859) Hawthome makes his fictional painter Miriam remark disgustedly that Gibson’s Venus had been stained with tobacco juice. This revulsion towards the work reflects a specific morality based upon a conception of female sexuality chat relied on a colonialist logic. The morality was then the measure of ‘good’ art, produced through the disavowal of the biological body which was not only the sexual body, but the racial body. In psychoanalytical terms, marble was not incidental but critical to the process of representation since it facilitated the fetishisation of the body, re-presenting it in a moral guise which could be visually understood as art, But as Parveen Adams has reminded us, fetishisation is not merely a regulation of the body, itis the regulation of difference (Adams, 32). “The critique of polychromy by Jarves and others was almost certainly predicated on direct or indirect knowledge of the work of Chailes Henri Joseph Cordier. The most celebrated contemporary practitioner, Cordes produced polychromed representations of black subjects under an official French commission (curatorial file, Musée d'Orsay). Combining marble, ‘onyx and bronze, works like Sudanese in Algerian Dress (1856-7) were produced for the ethnographic gallery in the Muséum d'histoire naturelle in Paris, Unlike the supposedly aesthetic aitns of neoclassical sculpture, the works of artist- ‘ethnographers functioned in this period like the ethnographic photographs which would ‘soon replace them. They stood for objective representations of bodies construed as scientific evidence of the racial difference and inferiority of ‘Other’ cultures and peoples, thereby supporting European colonisation. In the manner of an ethnographer, Cordier's physical proximity to his subjects served to validate his ‘findings’ in the field, Travelling to France's North African colonies on a grant of,cone thousand francs, his task was to portray racial ‘types’ chrough the amalgamation of individuals into composites - an aim confirmed by the ethnic, racial and cultural ‘generalisations of the sometimes interchangeable tides attached to his sculptures ~ Négre du Darfour (bronze 1853), Négre de Tombouctou (bronze 1853), Noir du Soudan (bronze 1856), Arabe de Biscara (bronze 1856), Femme Mauresque Noire (bronze 1856), Multresse (black marble and jasper, 1856) — now in the Musée de Homme. Based upon racial essentialism, the project identified the acceleration of racial hybridity within colonialism as a threat to so-called pure racial types which artist-ethnographers needed to capture. Like his human scientist ‘couriterparts, and more than the ‘fine’ artist, the artistethnographer worked within a colonial process dependent upon the white gaze as an ‘abjective’ rool of scrutiny. Cordier’s ethno- aesthetic was anti-neoclassical in its media which, through the use of coloured materials, signified racial difference at the level of skin. However, his work raises questions about his desire to represent ‘pure’ racial types rather than individual portraits, and to what extent his practice was similar to the ideal works of neoclassicism and their investment in racial differencing. The competing discourses of neoclassicism and polychrome polarised the aesthetic possibilidies of representing human subjects as members of a racial group and offered ‘opposing ideals of how race could be visualised in art. While the neoclassical preference for white marble left only physiognomy, anatomy and real or implied context open to sculptors, polychromists like Cordier implemented in addition arguably the most immediate signifier of skin colour/complexion. But these aesthetic practices have racial and sexual implications. Put simply, the racing of bodies has profound implications forthe sexualisation of bodies. Or, the sexualisation of bodies, how sex and sexuality are signified, affects the racalisation of the body, how race is made visible and legible. The Black Venus isan interesting category precisely because it defied the dominant historical Western logic of female beauty as white. It is not incidental that the majority of neoclassical marble bodies sculpted were female, since the idea that the white female body represented the pinnacle of aesthetic beauty was widely accepted. According to Jarves, Female loveliness is the most fascinating type of humanity. nit we have the highest development of form and color as united in beauty ... The Art that can rake us feel the smoothness and elasticity of the female skin, its clear, translucent surface, not lustrous but tender from its delicate mingling of white and pale warm. red, subdued by the nicest gradations of the purest and most pearly greys into sense-captivating loveliness, is scarcely of earthly mould. (Jarves, 152) This is of course white female loveliness which, in the context of nineteenth-century colonial discourse, was one and the same as female loveliness. The Black Venus is thus a paradox, since the black female stood as antithetical to the paradigmatic colonial ideal of beauty as both white and female, There is evidence that Cordier valued what the human sciences could offer sculpture. In VENUS AFRICAINE 33BLACK VICTORIANS o a lecture entitled "Types ethniques représentés par la sculpture’ for the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris in 1862, he elaborated upon his process of obtaining physiognomical measurements aimed at representing ‘the position of each feature, each depression, every landmark, and so on for all the lines, for all the contours, down to the most delicate crevice and protrusion’ (de Margerie, 27). Although the black populations of Paris and France appear to have been quite small throughout most of the nineteenth century, Cordier, unlike many of his contemporaries, gained direct access to other races through his govermment- funded tip to Algeria. However, since the Vénus Africaine was ‘completed before the trip to Africa, he evidently relied upon access to a black female model living in Paris at the time. The piece came after Cordier, aged 21, had sculpted ‘a superb ‘Sudanese’ from Darfur who came to the studio of Francois Rude, under whom Cordier studied, Cast in bronze, this was exhibited at the 1850 Salon under the deliberately exotic title Négre de Tombouctow and is now known as ‘Said Abdallah de la tibu du Darfour’ (Musée d’Orsay, no.16; Fig 14). The decision to shift the subject away from the model's origin im the Dafur foreshadowed its later role as ethnographic illustration (Honour, IVP, 101). Copies of it and the Vénus were purchased by the French state for display in the ethnographic gallery of the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle, to sit amongst a collection of skulls (de Margerie, 131). Most other casts and versions went to private art patrons, including the British Royal Family. Cordier’s Vénus therefore seems at fist a conflicted work, its inconsistencies expressed in part in these oppositional possession and display histories, as racial type made to stand in for blackness in ethnographic collections and simultaneously as decorative, artistic object in ‘wealthy European households. Yet was she not called upon to function in the same colonial racialised vein in both cases, whether for ‘scientific’ or aesthetic contemplation? However, Cordier’s Vénus is remarkably un-Venuslike. For one thing, she is not nude or even naked. As a sculptural bust, represented from the waist up, she defies the promise of Venus, typically a complete unveiled body, and is instead covered demurely with pattemed cloth, draped elegantly about her chest; the secure fastening does not even allude to the revelation of flesh, unlike so many representations of falling drapery, designed co titllate. Asa clothed figure, she isa precursor of the demure black maid in Manet's Olympia (1863) juxtaposed with the acrid nakedness of the white female prostitute. Moreover, Vénus's downcast eyes in a tilted head capture an intelligently introspective expression. The curve of her lips and nose registers a black African as opposed to any so-called racially mixed physiognomy, as do the fabulousdense curls of her hai, arranged in tight neat coils. It is hard to think of this woman as anything bu a portrait. Her specificity seems not to signal a (stereotype, but an individual, recognisable and legible to those who would have known het. But however portrat-like Cordier's subjects appear, their reception and his own self described sculptural process suggest a conscious method of selection and assemblage, reliant upon his own ideas of ‘common characteristics’ and ‘individual variation’ to produce a general type ‘in which all the beauties of the race... are combined!” (Cordier, 65-8), Like Pygmalion, Cordier worked from many models rewards an ideal type, which then took on the form of an individual. The problem here is that as a white French man, his ideals of beauty in other races ‘would have of course been influenced by the ideals of beauty in his own. In conrespondence with government ministers berween 1854-6, Cordier's forthcoming trip to Africa was billed as an artistic mission of the highest order which would result in 13 durable objects (sculptures) of importance to both the arts and sciences (de Margetie, 16) Within the colonial discourses of the time there was considerable fear of miscegenation and its effects, one of which was presumed to be the end of discrete races. Though Cordier escaped the dominant commitment to ideas of racial hierarchy and white superiority, he too expressed his mission in Algeria as the process of sculpting racial human types which were on the verge of blending together (Archives nationales, F 21 72, eranscribed in Durand-Revllon, 2. Of course, this ‘blending of races’ or the miscegenation that Europeans so feared, was precisely the result of their colonial drive, bringing together different peoples within hierarchically racialised relationships and institutions including slavery. The same colonial drive simultaneously and perhaps ironically sought to document and preserve the ‘original racial types which colonialism itself was ‘destroying’. Fundamentally, the feat of miscegenation was fear of the annihilation of racial difference and, most frighteningly for whites, their supposed distinctiveness and superiority. For Cordier, however, his visit to Africa represented in true artistic fashion a search for the beauty of humankind. Although the colonial ideologies responsible for funding his travels called for representation of ‘Others’ in ‘opposition to European whiteness, his sculptures frequently defied the belief in a singular beauty, attainable only to Europeans. He saw his practice as creating new value in sculpture through a study of races which could widen the ideals of beauty by locating them outside solely European origins (Honour, vol IV; 102). Remarkably, he seems to have possessed an idea of cultural relativity quite ahead of his time, Arguing for the universality of beauty rather than its exclusiveness to whites, Cordier told the superintendent of the Imperial Museums that ‘The most beautiful Negro is not the one who looks most like us, nor the one who presents the most pronounced characteristics associated with his race. Ic is the individual in wholm are united such forms and traits, and a face that reflects with harmony and balance the essential moral and intellectual character of the Ethiopian race’ (de Margerie, 28). This is a remarkable statement for the nineteenth century, directly opposed to the most pervasive and socially accepted scientific and scholarly thought of its time. Nevertheless, although Cordier’s search for beauty in other races had anti-colonial and anti-slavery aspects, seen explicitly in his Aimezsous les uns les autres or Praternité (1867), he also VENUS AFRICAINE, 55BLACK VICTORIANS 36 at times expressed the dominant belief in a hierarchy of beauty with the white subject on top (ee Honour, volIV, 104). And while his attitudes were relatively progressive, both the impetus and the resulting sculptures undeniably contributed to the colonial ideologies of race which so dominated his century And yet, Cordier’s Aftican Vénus seems oddly a testament more of things that would come than of his own age. There isa dignity to the Vénus Afrcaine missing from the sculptures of black female subjects of many of his contemporaries, whether polychromists or neoclassicists. There is a specificity which belies the allegorical name and offers instead the possibility of a portrait. There is a selfness which defies the desire to reduce her to ethnographic specimen. Sadly, that was precisely how the work functioned for so many. Nevertheless, it appears that Cordier’s African Venus, distinct from the colonial mould of black female stereotypes, may have been Venus in name only 1 This ot wo ine that Rake hao consol over her repesenaion. She cera had move than Barman. ‘Howeve, eae of her eFidendicaton, the lmerpretton of ber black female dency was ulate the hands ofa white cderal machine colonia soce,ICON OF THE AGE: ‘AFRICA’, VICTORIA AND THE SECRET OF ENGLAND’S GREATNESS Jan Marsh he large painting by Thomas Jones Barker (1815~82) called The Secret of England's Greatness (Cat.13) is now an iconic image of the Victortan era, With the monarch receiving homage from a kneeling prince, it seems a simple visual representation of Britain's imperial relation to Africa. As indeed itis, being when first exhibited described as ‘the very spirit of the age’, As such, it is not to present-day taste, politically or culturally. The Victorian idea of ‘England’ being ‘great’ in the world, ruling over an empire of grateful subjects, commands litde admiration and is now seen asa fairly short-lived phenomenon, having more to condemn than praise. But the painting is nota simple piece of imperialist boasting, Indeed, its subject explicitly rejects the notion of ‘greatness’ based on military might and economic power. Its subjects and history have othes, wider and deeper valencies, which in their complexity offer insights into the nature ofthe relation between ‘Victoria’ and ‘fica’ in the nineteenth century During the century a minor tradition evolved of commemorating diplomatic events frst in painting and illustration and then through photographs. There are, for example, Henry Room's picture of a delegation from Madagascar meeting Queen Adelaide in 1837 (Nat. Coll.BLACK VICTORIANS sa Madagascar) and John Absolon’s watercolour of Moracean envoys t0 Britain in 1850 (Royal Collection). Later, among others, came a portrait of King Cetshwayo by royal artist Carl Sohn in 1882 (Royal Collection) and group photographs of Tswana envoys in 1895. ‘At ist sight, therefore, Barker's picture belongs to this genre, Painted in 1861-3, it was conceived as a large royal portrait painting and patriotic subject. The scene shows Victoria presenting a Bible to an African envoy, in Windsor Castle. Victoria is accompanied by her consort Prince Albert, the second Duchess of Wellington, prime minister Viscount Palmerston and foreign secretary Lord John Russell But the presentation never took place. In 1886, Victoria's private secretary stared officially that there was ‘no foundation for the story’ (see The Bible Society Monthly Reporter, March 1898, 49). In fact the composition was founded on a widely circulated but apocryphal anecdote, which ran as follows: 1k was a noble and beautiful answer of our Queen ~ the monarch of a free people, reigning more by love than law, because seeking to reign in the fear of God ~ it was a noble answer she gave to an Affican Prince, who sent an embessage with costly presents, and asked her in return to tell him the secret of England's ‘greatness and England’s glory; and our beloved Queen sent him, not the number of her Vleet, not the number of her armies, not the account of her boundless merchandise, not the details of her inexhaustible wealth, She did not, like Hezekiah in an evil hour, show the ambassador her diamonds and her jewels, and her rich omaments, but handing him a beautifully bound copy of the Bible, she said “Tell the Prince that THIS IS THE SECRET OF ENGLAND'S GREATNESS’. (British Workman, Dec 1859, 1) ‘This tale circulated widely and by 1859 had given rise to an unsigned large-format print with the same ttle as Barker's picture but a different composition (Cat.14). This print, with an upright envoy, more courtiers and mo Albert, was reproduced with the text above in a magazine aimed at the mdustrious working class. The anecdore was naturally popular with and probebly originated in Church circles, especially Protestant Evangelical ones where the “Word of God’ held supervalue. One version in a tract from 1850 indeed declares that the author's ‘theory of England’s greatness, is, that England has the Bible. That mighty fabric of the British Constitution, upon which all civilised nations look with envy and wonder, has the Bible for its foundation stone. This is the true secret of England's greatness’ (Bickersteth, 6). ‘As the biblical inscription on Barker's frame emphasises, the pictorial subject was thus both patriotic and religious, And though apocryphal, the anecdote was also a tribute to Victoria's known pier, combined with her role as monarch in a period when British relations with Aftica were evolving ‘Vicworia's accession in 1837 coincided with the final ending of slavery in British colonies, For the next decade or three, Abolition remained a matter of national self congratulation, as ‘campaigning continued against slave wading in Alfica, against slavery in other nations’colonies and against slavery in the American South. Some politcal factions nevertheless ‘opposed British intervention overseas, deplored the cost of patrolling the Affican coast, and argued for the supposed benefit of slavery in the Caribbean and Confederate States. Others argued for ‘commerce and conversion’ as an ethical economic substitute for slave trading, promoting missionary schemes alongside energetic commercial development that would in time legitimise colonisation and conquest. In addition to trade, virtually every encounter with Alica involved either slavery or religion ot both Shorly before Victotia became Queen, the delegation from Madagascar, where Christian worship and evangelism were banned by the monarch Queen Ranalavona, was received at Windsor by William IV. His consort Queen Adelaide gave the envoys a message: “Iell the Queen of Madagascar from me, that she can do nothing so beneficial for her country as to receive the Christian religion’ (W. Ellis, 9. This encounter prompted the painting by Henry Room mentioned above, Malagasy Ambassadors received by Queen Adelaide (see NPG exhibition leaflet, June 1999). Exhibited in 1838, ic is one of the images that fed into The Secret of England's Greatness, Adelaide had sent a message to Aftica, Victoria was shown delivering it. Indeed, press reports of Barker's picture stated that it depicted ‘a Prince of Madagascar, a relative of the late Queen of that unhappy island” (Belfast Newsleter, 30 Apr 1864). Idenkifying the date as 1846, one added that “tJhe Malagese in all his gaudy attire kneels at the Queen's feet and her Majesty, then in the prime of her youth, is handing to him the Bible’ (Belfast Newsletter, 30 April 1864). This, however, was also mistaken; diplomatic relations had in fact been suspended in the 1840s following a Franco-British assault on Madagascar (The author probably had in mind che 1846 state visit of Ibrahim Pacha of Egypt, when much was made of his sumptuous military costume, jewelled scimitar and multitude of diamonds LN, 13 Jun 1846),) In any case, the envoy wears not Malagese but East African formal attire. Ava later date the picture was said to show Victoria with ‘the Sultan of Zanzibar’ (NPG Archive, RP 4969) and although no such sultan visited Britain in this era, London maintained diplomatic relations with Sayyid Sa'id (1791-1856), ruler of Oman and the East African coast, fan empire abutting that of British India, with a substantial fleet. Sultan Sayyid Sa'id established a capital in Zanzibar to control trade in ivory, gold, cloves, copal and slaves, All except the last were products to which the British wanted trade access, in exchange for manufactured goods, together with the suppression of slave trading. To Victoria's coronation in 1838 Sayyid Sa'id sent gifts with a ‘mission of congratulation’ headed by Ali bin Nasr, Govemor of Mombasa (Said -Ruete, 116). Victoria recorded his audience in her journal Avallitde before 8 I went into the White Drawing Room ... The Envoy knelt down and kissed my hand. He is avery striking looking person; aged 67; he is not tal, ‘of a very dark mahogany colour, with fine intellectual black eyes, thick lips, and a very shor sort of black beard; he showed no halt; his dress was beautiful; he had a fine shawl turban on his head, one side of which hung down, a dark blue cloth dress which showed scarlet vest, a shawl girdle through which was stuck a dick, ICON OF THE AGE 39BLACK VICTORIANS 60 and an Oriental cimetar [sic] slung over the left shoulder completed the costume of this very interesting man. (courresy Royal Archive, Windsor) Following this vsit, a commercial teaty was signed in Zanzibar in May 1839. Slave trading remained an issue, the British consul reporting in 1841 that over 8000 slaves were sold annually on Zanzibar and Pemba, and that the Sultan had no power or wish to stop this. Unged by Britain, Sayyid replied It is the same as the orders of Azrael ~ nothing but to obey. Even I will write to the Queen and her wazirs’ (Gray, 245-6). Ali bin Nast went again to London, bearing emeralds, pearls, Arab horses. ‘We then received the Envoy from the Imam cof Muscat, the same old man who was here in "38, and who Iwas glad to see again,’ Vitoria recorded. ‘He kissed both mine and Alben’s hands. He had a young and fine interpreter (Muhammed bin Khamis] with him, also in the national dress’ (1842 Journal, Royal Archives, Windsor). Sayyid’s letter was couched in traditional courtesies and itis wholly plausible both that his ambassador would speak of Britain's global power in a similar manner and that Victoria would voice her usual commitment to religion. The apocryphal anecdote may have some basis here Meanwhile, the British government offered to pay for each slave released, and Sayyid promised to suppress the export trade from January 1847. According to Palmerston, ‘Great Britain is the main instrument in the hands of providence for putting an end to the Aftican slave trade’ (Colley 360). By this date, the personal commitment of both Victoria and Albert was widely known. In 1838 Victoria was the focus of a humanitarian petition signed by 700,000 British women calling for immediate emancipation and, though precluded from public response, het sympathy became clear. In 1840, Albert's first public act as consort was as patron of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the Civilization of AVfica, a renewed attempt to persuade West African kingdoms to substitute palm oil production for the capture and sale of slaves ~ endeavours reflected in William Allen's Picturesque Views ofthe River Niger (Cat 1). ‘This same summer, Biard’s lurid Slave Trade (Cat.18) was the focus of attention at the RA, leading Tamer to produce his famous Slavers throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying ~ Typhoon Coming On, with its reference to a notorious case from the previous century. Simultaneously delegations from both sides ofthe Atlantic were attending the world Anti- Slavery Convention in London, with its declared aims of ‘universal abolition’ and protecting “the infanc liberties of the emancipated Negroes in the British Colonies’ (BFASS, 19). Undeclared aims included British self congratulation and fierce criticism of the United States and France. Again, these aims were too politically sensitive for open royal support. (A few years later, however, Albert purchased Henry le Jeune’s Liberation of the Slavs, celebrating French ¢olonial emancipation ) The organisers of the World Convention hired Benjamin Robert Haydon to paint a large memorial of the event, inclading as many thumbnail portraits as could be grouped on one ‘canvas. Always aspiring to history painting, Haydon chose as his motif the opening speech by veteran Abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, sole survivor of the 1787 initiative, to which HenryICON OF THE AGE Beckford of Jamaica responded. One of four Afro-Caribbean delegates, who were participating in global forum and for the first ime speaking for themselves rather than being spoken for Beckford said he had lived his first 28 years as a slave, cited brutal incidents from personal ‘experience, and tendered thanks to the movement, especially the ‘British ladies’ who had done so much for the cause (BFASS, 22). ‘Swept along by che emotional event, Haydon experienced a change of mind. Having hitherto believed in the ‘irrevocable’ gulf between African and European, he saw them approaching equality ~ a notion realised in his composition, which shows Clarkson among a vast crowd, with Beckford in the foreground, seated between white men ~ ‘a liberated slave, now a delegate’ with the hand of a friend resting affectionately on his arm. “This is the point of imterest ... the Affican sitting by the European, in equality and intelligence, whilst the patriarch of the cause points to heaven as to whom he must be grateful’ (Haydon 1841, 10), “This message is comparable to that of The Secret of England’s Greatness. Victoria, standing, gestures to the Bible rather than heaven; her guest knees in gratitude. ‘Some white sitters voiced objections to Beckford’s pictorial prominence ~ the purpose of the painting being to celebrate benefactors not recipients — and their own proximity to him, To Haydon, this smacked of humbug. “This was the touchstone,’ he wrote. ‘An abolitionist on thorough principle would have gloried in being so placed’ (Haydon 1860-63, 644). When American women were prevented from taking part in the Convention, they protested loudly, invoking Victoria's monarchical position. She and Albert meanwhile also followed efforts to persuade West Alrican rulers to suppress slave traffic. Instructions from colonial secretary Lord John Russell to the new British expedition to the Niger, on 30 January 1841, repeatedly invoked Victoria's position as head of state, Thus: You will tell the Chief that you are sent by the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland to express Her Majesty's wish to establish friendly relations and agree ‘with him for the extinction of the Foreign trafic in Slaves You will tell him that Her Majesty proposes that upon his abolishing the Slave Trade ... that he shall have for his own shate ... 5 per cent part value of ‘every article of British merchandise sold in his dominions ‘You will not fall to impress upon him the impolicy as well as the injustice of slavery and the abhorrence in which itis held by Her Majesty and the people of England While you describe the power and wealth of your country ... you will abstain carefully from any threat. You will state that the Queen and the people of England profess the Christian Religion; that by this religion they are commanded to assist in promoting goodwill, peace and brotherly love among all nations and men . afterall your attempts fail... you will conclude by telling the Chief that Her Majesty is bound to use all her naval means to put a stop to the exportation of slaves from the dominions of every African chief, and that the chief and his subjects will, when perhaps too late, regret their conduct ... (BPP #72) 61BLACK VICTORIANS 62 In this context, the Bible was not so much the ‘secret’ behind Britain's global prowess, but its aim, half-concealed behind « humanitarian mask This Niger expedition, like the fist, failed miserably, from the British point of view. But ‘endeavours continued and the pious anecdote in Barker's painting had another factual basis, according to the Church Missionary Society, whose president brought a message in 1848 from Sagbua Okukenun, ruler of Abeokuta (South-west Nigeria), saying his people welcomed trade and missionaries and deplored slavery. Victoria replied: ‘The commerce between nations ... is blessed by God. Not so the commerce in slaves, which makes poor and miserable the nation which sells them The Queen and people of England are very glad to know that Sagbua and the chiefs think as they do .., But commerce alone will not make a nation great and happy like England. England has become great and happy by the knowledge of the true God and Jesus Christ. The Queen is therefore very glad to hear that ‘Sagbua and the chiefs have so kindly received the missionaries, who carry with them the word of God ... To show how much the Queen vahies God's Word, she sends with this, as a present to Sagbua, a copy of this work in two languages - one the Arabic, the other the English. (Walsh, 54-5) In the royal exchange of gifts, bibles no doubs featured frequently. It was however thanks to the effors of churchmen like the firs black Anglican bishop, Samuel Ajayi Crowther (Cat42), in translating the gospels into African languages, that the Christian religion made headway. In 1850, further efforts in West Africa resulted in an unexpected refugee arriving in Bntain, courtesy of the Navy. While negotiating with the ruler of Dahomey (now Benin), (Commander Forbes was presented with an orphan girl captured from a neighbouring territory, whom he accepted, believing she would otherwise be sacrficially killed or sold. When informed, Victoria was ‘graciously pleased to arrange for the education and subsequent fate of the child’ (Forbes, 81) and stood godmother when she was baptised Sarah Forbes Bonetta — after her guardian and the ship he commanded. Baptism was regarded as crucially important for those finding sanctuary in Britain. The personal interest Victoria maintained in Sarah's. welfare — see Cat.11 ~ and in that of her eldest daughter, Victoria, named for her royal godmother, was well known to the public. During the late 1840s and early 1850s, several ‘fugitive slaves’ from the United States found asylum in Britain to avoid being returned to their owners. Together with other black campaigners, their presence both boosted the number of publicly known black individuals and kept the Aboltionist cause very active. The most celebrated figure was Frederick Douglass, a charismatic campaigner in Britain from 1845 to 1847; others included free-born ‘Charles Remond, who electrified audiences in 1840, and his sister Sarah Remond; William Wells Brown, in England 1849-54; William and Ellen Craft, who arrived in 1850 and retumed home in 1865; William Allen, who arrived in 1853 and remained permanently: and Henry Box Brown, so called because he had escaped inside a cargocrate, who toured popular venues with a panorama of slave conditions, The refuge that Britain afforded to such people underlined the legal judgement that “on British soil’ no one could be enslaved. Fist pronounced in 1772, this was re-affirmed in 1820, and again in 1850 when the United States strengthened its Fugitive Slave Law, threatening the liberty of those who had escaped to Canada. Victoria was widely credited with proclaiming the principle that no nnaway would be handed back. In this, as in policy towards West and East Africa, her agency was minimal but her personal endorsement was valued. This year she was again petitioned by British women, urging a royal boycott of slave- produced American sugar and cotton goods. ‘The year 1851 saw the Great Exhibition, a ‘world's fair’ in which Albert took a leading role. Exhibits, exhibitors and visitors came from all over the globe (Cats 75, 76). This Intemational aspect prompted some curious responses in the press. One satite portrayed ‘cannibals’ enjoying a meal in a café; tourism from Aitica and other ‘primitive’ realms was plainly a novel idea In fact, though there were many foreign visitors, including some from India and Africa (Brown 1852, 210), among all the exhibitors ‘there was not a single black man’ except Josiah Henson (Cat.70). There were indeed Afticans “brought to be exhibited’, he reported, “but no exhibitors but myself. Though my condition was wonderfully changed from what it was in my childhood and youth, yet it was a litte saddening to reflect that my people were not more largely represented there’ (Henson, 192). Owing to obstruction by the American delegation, Henson had to display a notice stating that his walnut wood exhibits were ‘THE PRODUCT OF THE INDUSTRY OF A FUGITIVE SLAVE FROM THE UNITED STATES, WHOSE RESIDENCE IS DAWN, CANADA. This autacted attention ftom Victoria who, accompanied by courtiers, paused to read the placard. ‘Luncovered my head and saluted her as respectfully as I could,’ Henson recalled, ‘and she was pleased with perfect grace to rerurn my salutation. “Is he indeed a fugitive slave?” I heard her inquire; and the answer was, “He is indeed, and that is his work” (Henson 1879, 191) While in Britain, when asked to propose a toast, Henson chose the words: ‘Honour to the brave, freedom to the slave, success to British emancipation. God bless the Queen!” (Henson 1879, 200). Slavery prompted another incident at the Great Exhibition, when campaigners including WW Brown and the Crafis demonstrated beside a statue by American sculptor Hiram Powers, entitled The Greek Slave (1844). Brown held up a Punch cartoon showing ‘The Virginian Slave’ ~ an enchained black woman ~ declaring it the ‘most fiting companion’ to Powers’ work (Cherry, 131-2. Another notable sculpture on exhibition was Charles Cordier’s bronze bust of Said Abdullah from Dafur, labelled as ‘a Negro from Timbuctoo’ (Fig.14). Victoria, or perhaps Albert, was struck by the bust, and the purchase was completed the following year with a companion piece, Venus Africaine (Fig, 12). Together they formed birthday and Christmas gifts for Albert in 1852 This same year, Victoria was among the thousands who wept over Uncle Tom's Cabin ICON OF THE AGE 63BLACK VICTORIANS on (Gt sold a million copies in Britain in 12 months) and early in 1853 she promoted the Stafford House address, another mammoth Abolitionist appeal with half a million signatures, addressed to American women via Harriet Beecher Stowe. Knowledge of royal sympathy for the enslaved thus also informs Barker's depiction of Victoria — with Albert, Palmerston and Russell — graciously bestowing a Bible on a grateful African. Not coincidentally, the kneeling figure recalls the familiar, 60-year-old Abolitionist emblem ‘Am I not a man and a brothe:?. Victoria's gesture could be that of manumission, Personal and politcal aspects of the state are brought together in a composition flattering those depicted for Britain's Abolitionist role. Significantly, Victoria's hand does not touch the ‘African's social and racial distance are preserved. The relation is philanthropic not fraternal, The composition also half-echoes that of William Mulready's The Tayseller (Cat.74) in which a white pair - mother and child — turn away from an African’s outstretched hand. The setting and pictorial genre are utterly different but, just as Barker makes the white ethnicity of Victoria and her Saxon consort contrast with the polished ebony of the envoy, so Mulready's dark-skinned toyseller contrasts with the blond English child. Both carry messages of ‘emphatic difference. The Indian insurrection of 1857-8 permanently altered British confidence in the goodness of their colonial role, eroding white notions of fratemity ~ condescending at best, and always dependent on the gratitude and Christian humility of the ‘brothers’ and ‘sister’. But Russell's proclaimed hope of sharing ‘the blessings of christianity’ and persuading people that ‘wherever the British flag flies they have a friend and protector’ (Morris, 37) was maintained. The energetic circulation in verbal and visual form of Victoria's apocryphal message to ‘an African Prince’ may reflect renewed insistence on what would now be called the battle for hearts and minds ~ the importance of ensuring that ‘natives’ everywhere Britain wished to do business adopted its religion and values. Anti-slavery pressure continued in respect of East Africa. David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels, published in 1857, underlined the continuing conviction that suppression of slavery and religious conversion were joint causes on which financial support for ‘exploration’ of the continent was founded. Indeed, in the context of mid-century mission activity, Barker's composition is a geographically transposed variant on the familiar trope of ‘taking the Bible to ‘Arica’. It shows Britain ‘giving’ Christianity to ‘Aftica’, whose grateful reception in cum figures the welcome the British wished to receive when taking themselves, their religion and their manufactures to the continent. Abolitionist sentiment also maintained momentum regarding the Southem USA. Indeed, a recent historian sees this as part of Barker’s message: ‘Painted at the start of the Civil War, The Secret of England’s Greamess conveys the superiority of the English manner of domestication [of black barbarians] over American violence’ (Munich, 145). Paintings on ‘American slavery regularly featured at the RA, where Cat.9 and Cat.32 were both on view in. 1861. All these aspects were therefore current when Barker sought a new subject in keeping ‘with his pictorial ambitions. His previous work was ‘The Intellect and Valour of Great Britain’hailing British scientists, engineers, generals and politicians. What a wretched picture, wrote the Art Journal. Barker should attempt a better theme. ‘Let him paint some scene in which ‘one of those high attributes of England shall glow with characteristic and truthful fire upon his canvas’ (AJ, 1861, 253). The familiar tale that acted also as patriotic and religious allegory and chimed with contemporary views on ‘civilising’ other peoples was an obvious choice. ‘Though he took pains to paint a costume appropriate to a Zanzibar visitor, Barker did not aim to create a portrait. For one thing, he made the scene a contemporary one, with the British costumes correct for 1861. For another, the theme was geographically wide, encompassing, ‘many realms where missionaries were active. Barker may well have intended viewers to see the envoy as an amalgam of East and West Afiica, India and Ceylon — even also Madagascar, where official relations had just been restored and the first missionaries were soon to arrive, bearing two main commodities: copies of the Bible and portraits of Victoria (LN, 4 Sep 1863, 231) Barker's compositional sketch for The Secret of England's Greatness bears an original label which reads: ‘painted by Thom. Jones Barker 1861. H.M. Queen Victoria presenting to an African Prince the Bible, with the Words: “This is the Secret of England's Greatness and England’s Glory.” Copyright disposed of” (Kroll, 248). The copyright claim indicates the work was destined for reproduction, which is probably why the composition was altered from a square to a rectangular format. This also has the effect of increasing the distance between envy and monarch. The painting was intended for exhibition in 1862, either at the RA or at the contemporaneous International Exhibition. It did not appear, no doubt because national ‘mourning after Albert’s sudden death at the end of 1861 made the subject inauspicious. But in 1863, Barker returned to work, now requesting permission to sketch the throne room at Windsor Castle (LCI 125.66, 6 Apr 1863, Royal Archive), The request was refused, so the background remains indistinct. The picture received an elaborate frame with a carved plaque in the shape of an open Bible and went on display at a commercial gallery, where it excited virtually no attention. A provincial tour of northem England and Ireland in 1864-5 proved more successful. As the Belfast press noted, iis a picture that will engrave beautifully, and many a home in the North of Ireland, if we mistake not, will be decorated with this drawing representation (sic] of an incident in the life of the Queen, which at once illustrates the virtues of the Coun, the religious tone of her Majesty's mind and, in a certain sense, the very spirit of the age. (Belfast Newsletter, 30 Apr 1864) The print was issued on 30 November 1864, as The Bible, with ‘The Secret of England's Greatness’ as subtitle. A large mixed mezzotint, in an edition of 620, it was produced by leading engraver WH. Simmons, who had engraved other royal subjects, notably ‘Winterhalter’s 1859 portrait of Victoria (BM 13.10.15.40; Guise, 158). As a print, it reached the public, being seen for example in Manchester in 1876 by Thomas Johnson, who had been bom into slavery in America and was on his fist visit ro Britain. His eye was caught by the ICON OF THE AGE 6BLACK VICTORIANS 66 picture of Victoria giving the Bible to ‘an AFRICAN Prince who was on his knees with open hands receiving it. Johnson endorsed its message with fervour: ‘the secret of England's greatness is the BIBLE, God’s message to this sin-cursed world’ (Johnson, 82). The painting itself vanished from view, being bought by a self-made businessman in north-east England, with whose heirs it remained until 1916. Meanwhile, relations beaween Victoria and her black subjects deteriorated. In Jamaica, political protests were suppressed with violence by Govemor Eyre, with shooting, summary executions, floggings and torching of dwellings, Carlyle felt his wamings over negro ‘emancipation were vindicated and, as with the US Civil Wat, Britons took sides, for and against Eyre — John Stuart Mill leading the campaign to have him prosecuted. In AMrica, the Zanzibar slave market was finally closed ater threats to send a gunboat and in 1868 a botched British expedition to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) resulted in the death of the Emperor and the arrival in Britain of his young son, Alamayu, as a politcal refugee (Cat.8). Victona’s compassion was ‘again aroused towards this Aftican orphan, but her concer could not save him from an unhappy exile which ended with his death at the age of 17. A couple of years earlier, she had summoned Josiah Henson from Scotland to Windsor, after reading his autobiography, 10 express her “respect and esteem’ and her lifelong interest in his ‘allcted people’ (Henson 1879, 311). Then came the British wars against the Zulu Kingdom in South Africa, the defeat at Isandlwana, the eventual bloody victory and the seizure of paramount chief Cetshwayo (Cav16). Victoria's response was to commission a battle picture, The Defence of Rorke’s Drift (1882, Royal Collection), from military artist Elizabeth Butler ~ who had to resort to using, ‘members of a “Zulu dance’ troupe as models for the undifferentiated African presence in her painting ~ and also a porumait of Cetshwayo, when he visited Britain in 1882, This was painted by royal painter Carl Sohn, for Victoria's collection (now on loan to Durban Museum). ‘Alongside portraits and paintings of Indian subjects, the Royal Collection contains many other representations of African subjects, which testify to the spreading remit of British imperial sway; the subject would repay more study. A few more images deserve attention. One is a landscape by the African-American artist Robert Scott Duncanson, who toured Britain in 1866, which would seem to be the only known Victorian picture by a black artist in Briain ‘Another is the portrait of Mohammed, a Nubian (C2t.96) painted by Victoria’s daughter, an accomplished artist who made ita birthday gift to her mother It joined Said Abdallah and the Venus Africaine at Osbome, perhaps in recognition of Victoria's longstanding interest in people from that continent Finally, there is John Charlton's panoramic picture of Victoria arriving at St Paul’ for her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. As well asa splendid troop of Sikh cavalry, among the ecclesiastical crowd on the steps are several black bishops ~ one of the main legacies from “Victoria’ to “Alrica “The engraved Secret of England's Greatness became a Protestant icon in Ireland, the central ‘motif coming to feature in Orange Order iconography. Its ubiquity is illustrated in James Joyce's Ubsses, set in 1904, where a reference to current events mocks the supposedly ‘cordial relations’ between Britain and its colonies.ICON OF THE AGE: ‘A delegation of the chief cotton magnates of Manchester was presented yesterday to his majesty the Alaki of Abealaatu by Gold Stick in Waiting, Lord Walkup on Eggs. The dusky porentate, in the course of a happy speech ... tendered his best thanks to Massa Walkup and emphasised the cordial relations existing between, Abeakutu and the British Empire, stating that he treasured as one of his dearest possessions an illuminated Bible, the volume of the word of God and the secret of England’s greatness, graciously presented to him by the white chief woman, the ‘great squaw Victoria. (Joyce, 433-4) The alake in question was the son of Sagbua, who in 1849 had in fact received two Bibles from Victoria. But the allusion testifies to the long life and wide currency of the anecdote and its headline phrase in both Africa and Britain.