Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800-1900 (review)

The exhibition Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900 opened in the Manchester City Art Gallery in 2005 and then traveled to its only other venue, the Birmingham Museum and Gallery. The innovative nature of the show is highlighted in the catalog's forward by David Dabydeen, who sees the exhibition as part of a long overdue acknowledgment of images of blacks in art history. This exhibition follows on some recent efforts to highlight these issues in UK museums, for example the Victoria and Albert Museum's Victorian Vision (2001) and more recent Black British Style, which toured to Manchester, Leicester, and Bradford in 2005. Although perhaps not immediately evident from the title, Black Victorians focuses on representations of black people—what the show is missing is representations by black artists. The black/Native sculptor Edmonia Lewis, for example, was not included in the show; unfortunately, the parameters of the grouping were works that were seen in Britain during the Victorian period, and although Lewis traveled to Italy, her work was not exhibited in Britain.

A luxuriously produced hardbound catalog was published by Lund Humphries to accompany the exhibition. Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900 includes color illustrations of a remarkable range of objects, from photography and print, to watercolors, to oils and bronze sculpture, demonstrating the extraordinary diversity of images of black people produced across the century. The exhibition and catalog force the viewer to revisit and re-examine already canonical paintings such as The Beloved (1865–66), Dante Gabriel Rossetti's jewel-like portrayal of a bride surrounded by four attendants of differing ethnic types and an African child. The exhibit highlights recurring tropes such as slave market scenes—in this case by William Müller, Eyre Crowe, and Frank Brangwyn—merging political outrage and voyeurism, as well as lesser-known artists and images. Some of the latter have entered art historical discourse quite recently, such as Thomas Baines's portrait of Shibante, a Native of Mazaro, Boatman and Pilot (1859) and Joanna Boyce Wells's Head of Mrs. Eaton (1861). Photograph portraits similarly range across class and profession—as well as degree of familiarity—from Sarah Forbes Bonetta (Queen Victoria's god-daughter) and the acrobat Mademoiselle LaLa, also depicted by Edgar Degas, to an early group portrait of Greenwich pensioners. The catalog also features the portrait of the black nurse Mary Seacole, famous for her work in Crimea, recently rediscovered and loaned to the National Portrait Gallery.

The exhibit juxtaposes pieces of "fine art" with works associated with more popular forms of print, such as George Cruickshank's The New Union Club (1819) and an advertisement for Sunlight soap, the racial undertones of which been interrogated in recent scholarship. Such images offer a more representative, albeit disturbing, vision of the range of depictions of black people evident in nineteenth-century culture.

In addition to an introduction and essay by curator Jan Marsh, the volume contains impressive essays by academics and curators who pursue themes arising from the selection of works encompassed by the exhibition. Radiclani Clytus examines lithographic prints produced in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, arguing that American attitudes towards black subjectivity were not dissimilar to British discursive and visual representations. As a result of archaeological discoveries, Victorian sculpture was divided into two opposing aesthetics, those espousing neo-classical white marble versus those experimenting with the more historically authentic color, as exemplified by John Gibson's Tinted Venus (1851–56). Charmaine Nelson considers the use of polychromy to denote race in sculpture, positioning Charles Cordier's dignified Vénus Africaine (1852) in the context of this debate and colonial discourses. Cordier traveled to Algeria and expressed contemporary concerns about miscegenation, but he also articulated a universal ideal of beauty.

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