What Will Blackness Be?

Erica Moiah James (speaking) with Geri Augusto, Melissa Barton, and Tayari Jones

Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014

Until the fall of 2014, on the fourth floor of the Yale Center for British Art hung a painting entitled Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl of Harrington, 1782 by the illustrious English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. As the label informed the viewer:

Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl of Harrington, 1782

Charles Stanhope (1753–1829) served under General John Burgoyne in the disastrous Hudson Valley Campaign of 1777, during the American War of Independence. Although he had been deeply involved in the embarrassing British defeat at the battle of Saratoga, Lord Harrington was exonerated of any responsibility for the failure. After a second and brief period of active service in Jamaica, during which many of his troops died of fever, Harrington was in the conventional manner promoted to the rank of colonel then appointed aide de camp to the king. It is likely that he commissioned this portrait from Reynolds, to commemorate his rise in military rank, his succession to his father’s earldom, and his marriage to Jane Fleming who later joined her husband in the royal household as a lady of the bedchamber to Queen Charlotte. One of Reynolds’s several portraits of Lady Harrington is also in the collection of Yale University Art Gallery.

What the label failed to mention, discuss, or name was the rather prominent figure of a young black page carrying a helmet, gazing expectantly at the anachronistically attired Stanhope, presented as if about to sit at King Arthur’s round table rather than lead a campaign in eighteenth-century Jamaica. Rendered in plain sight to contemporary audiences, the page remained invisible from the vantage point of the institution.

How might museums and curators refuse what Brian Wallis has described as the “pose of disinterested empiricism” often called on to support disciplinary and exhibition practices that fail to account for the afterlife of an object whose meaning, signification, and sight lines, more often than not, shift over time?¹ How might curators and art historians today attend to the ethical imperative that comes with acknowledging shifts in audience? In a specific context, how might institutions and scholars draw on the work of contemporary artists to make black things, black people, and blackness visible within institutions and discourses?

In Georgian painting, black figures were often deployed and read as pure surface, as bodies without presence or interiority, whose value lay solely in their role as a formal, symbolic, and semiotic prop. Their image formally and ideologically optimized the literal and figurative “whiteness” of the central European figure, adding a sense of delicacy and light to white skin in opposition to the brutality of blackness.² These black and brown figures always signified, often symbolically connecting the wealth of the white European figure pictured to the Caribbean, America, and/or India, or indicating a queer moment in the painting, that all was not quite what it may seem in the frame. Their smart dress and unwavering adoration of the central figure set the tone for the way audiences were intended to view the primary sitter as socially worthy and morally pure. In other words, the black adoring male, or ambiguously gendered female, became a kind of eighteenth-century selfie for the central subject.

Though the conventional approach in the discipline of art history has been to read these black figures in this manner, as compositional devices rather than individual subjects—as if one necessarily foreclosed the possibility of the other—Judy Sund’s work on Jean Antoine Watteau invites a moment of pause in relation to this widely accepted framing. Watteau often painted black people represented in his paintings from life studies and Sund argues that though unnamed, it is important to note that these representations had a human referent whose presence is also embedded in the paintings. Is the burden of proof for humanity racialized in the history of painting? Must a rendered black child be named in order to have recognized personhood? Reynolds’s figuration through representation...