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Slavery, Portraiture and The Slavery, Portraiture and the CHARMAINE NELSON Cetarticleinspire'delame'thodologie~ministepost-colonialiste themselves to a painter, except those who were of du Portrait ofa Neqo Slave (1786) ainsi que des repre'- greatfamilies,-. or remarkable for their actionsin service sentations des esclaves noires Europkennes et Amkricaines to the country, or some other extraordinary circum- stance .. as lately . .. every body almost who can afford twenty pounds, has the portraits of himself, This disavowal of the racial wife and children painted. (qtd. in Pointon 2) implications of this unique portrait has The Earl's analysis, tinged with elitism and regret, is occurred despite the artist's obvious useful in its revelation of the remarkable shifts in the desire to foreground the slave'^ sexual production ofportraiture in late eighteenth-century Eng- and reproductive utility. land. In noting the usual subjects of portraiture as people ofgreatfamiliesor considerable action, Fife knowledgeably conveyed the historical function of portraiture as an rapporte que cefirentdes lieux oh s 'estformkel'identification aristocratic and bourgeois cultural tool of social distinc- h raciale et sexuelle et 00 communaute' noire s 'est &ployhe et tion, which itself was largely-. inaccessible to the masses confirmke. through the function of its cost. His concern locates an anxiety over the democratization of the genre which "Portrait of a Negro Slave" (1786), painted by Fran~ois points up the dismantling of its traditionally exclusive Malepart de Beaucourt, is a rare, early oil painting of a class and racial affiliations. The everybody whom Fife black female slave. Its significance is multi-fold: 1) it lamented were the lower classes, previously barred from represents an historic individual as opposed to an idealized such cultural participation and aspiration, who now threat- type; (2) it is possibly the only preserved and almost ened to pollute the previously exclusive art form with their undoubtedly the most thorough and professionally ren- supposedly unworthy subjects. Fife's distress locates a dered representation of a black slave in Canada at this particular social anxiety over the reordering of a prestig- historical juncture; (3) it offers an unparalleled opportu- iousvisual practicewhich had for centuries relied upon the nity to explore the specific colonial context of slavery in hierarchization ofhuman subjects through class and racial eighteenth-century North America (New France); and (4) identifications. it confirms the visibility and legibility of the racialized Up until the latter part of the eighteenth-century, the body as the means of identifying a slave. practice of portraiture (especially that of oil painting) in The traditional disciplinarity of art history has actively England and across Europe had remained the secure denied the relevance of issues of race and racial identity, cultural domain of the considerably wealthy, the genea- and as such has foreclosed crucial considerations about the logically privileged, the noteworthy or the notorious. In nature, context and function of art. Informed by a post- all cases, however, the portrait subjects or the commis- colonial feminist methodology, this paper will discuss sioning body needed the economic resources to be able to "Portrait of a Negro Slave" (1786) and other western contract the portraitist. Whereas those who patronized (European and American) representations ofblack female portraitists in England were of the aristocratic slaves as sites where racial and sexual identification was and bourgeois classes, in Canada, still a young settler and where the black slave body as commodity colony, the clientele ofwhat few portraitists existed in the was confirmed and deployed. period were dominantly of the bourgeoning mercantile classes, often French, English or otherwise European by Introduction: The Democratization of Portraiture birth, whose cultural traditions and aspirations were very much tied to the ideals of their homelands. England is a Writing in 1796, the English Earl of Fife remarked of particularly relevant and rich resource for a study in the portraiture: (im)possibilities of race and class identity in eighteenth- century Canadian portraiture for several reasons. Firstly, . .. before this century, very few people resented Canada's earliest immigrants were dominantly Europeans 22 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIESILES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME Colonial Limits of Canadian Art History of French and English origins, fulfilling the colonial governments mandate for the racial ideal of desirable populations. As Eva Mackey has described, Canada's nation-building project depended upon the manage- ment of diverse populations and specifically the regu- lation of racial identity within a contest of competing desires which often posed contradictory claims of tolerance, equality and opportunity. Secondly and culturally speaking, Canadian art practices of this period were directly borrowed from established Euro- pean models, mainly English and French. The extent of this cultural debt extended for decades into the nineteenth-centurywhen Canadian art was dominated by European immigrants or by Canadian-born white artists who nevertheless knew training in London and Paris to be essential to their art education and profes- sional futures. The discursive structure of eighteenth- century English portraiture was accordingly not only known to Canadian portraitists through tradition, but often through direct contact and practice. And lastly, the eighteenth-century English democratization of por- traiture which was unequivocally a key aspect of its decided dominance over other more traditionally re- vered genres of history and landscape painting, was a cultural shift which could not have failed to impact the developing art practices in Canada (Pointon).' Canonical Exclusions: Canadian Art History, Frangois Ma/epa/f de Beaucort, "Pofirait of a Negro S/ave, " 7786, 011 on Portraiture and Race canvas /aid on canvas, 72 7x58.5 cm. Courtesy of the McCord Museum of Canadian Histoy, Monfrea,! Reprinted with permission. Little scholarly attention has been paid to the historical white male masters. This colonial bias has affected every practice of portraiture in Canadian art and even less to a aspect of the discipline, from what cultural objects are social consideration of the obvious implications of race deemed significant enough to be researched or written and class identity within such a traditionally exclusive and about, the accessibility or preservation of a cultural object inaccessible art form. The absence of scholarship is in part (which is directly connected to its canonical value and due to a general slowness of an application of the ideolo- acquisition by an institutional collection), the access to gies and strategies of New Art History to historical Cana- documentation to facilitate research (the archives and dian subjects. But it is also clearly an outcome of the libraries are not neutral), how one frames one's research, eurocentric disciplinarity of art history itself. which questions are validated and therefore posed in the Art historical discourse has traditionally suppressed race face of an art object and last but surely not least, the very as avalid topic ofscholarly inquiry, through the exclusionary identities-the sex and race etc.-of the art historians deployment ofmethodologies which privileged biographi- themselves. cal, connoisseurship and formalistic inquiries. These so- A poignant example of the art historical devaluation cially-detached andlor culturally-exclusivepredominantly and suppression of issues of race exists in the Canadian aesthetic histories supported the (re)constitution of mate- hi~toriograph~ofa celebrated eighteenth-century portrait rially and ideologically exclusive canons and successionsof painting of a black female slave. Within the annals of VOLUME 23, NUMBER 2 23 Canadian art history, Fran~oisMalkpart de Beaucourt's subject considers the western tradition of portraiture as a (1740-94) "Portrait of a Negro Slave" (1786), a rare visual colonial site ofvisual cornmodification which enacted the document of a slave in early New France, has traditionally transformation of the black body into the slave body-a been discussed almost entirely in terms of its stylistic and shift from human to property and commodity. tonal properties, the location represented in the portrait and the status and oeuvre of the painter. For example, Slavery in New France Dennis Reid, author of the canonical text A Concise History of Canadian Painting (1988), described it as an Slavery was an inherent part of the earliest colonizing object which de Beaucourt painted possibly, " .. while process of Canada. In the early sixteenth century the sojourning in Guadeloupe" (40).' Portuguese initially targeted the Native populations for This disavowal of the racial implications of this unique slave labour and by the beginning of the seventeenth the portrait has occurred despite the artist's obvious desire to French followed suit (Winks). Olivier Le Jeune as he was foreground the slave's sexual and reproductive utility renamed, was the first documented black slave in New France (now the province ofQuebec) wink^).^ But more importantly his passage directly from Africa and his sale at de Beaucourt's sexual relationship auction in New France locates the institution of slavery as with this female slave is diffused an accepted part of the reality of the new settlement (%'inks).* Colonization was not the immediate strategy of through
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