In 1875, Charles Dickens, reflecting on the history of “The Black Man” in Britain observed: “Caricatures, a generation or so old, abound in representations of the black man. And from the caricaturists, very much is to be learned touching a nation’s manners and customs. The negro coachman, a very portly person, with powder over his curly pate; the negro footman, in a brilliant livery, stately of port and stalwart of body, if somewhat unshapely as to his nether limbs; in how many illustrations of social life do not these worthies appear?” The art historian Temi Odumosu, trawling through thousands of Georgian paintings and prints (and uncovering previously unpublished works) has now provided substantial scholarship to confirm Dickens’s observation.
She reminds us that every major artist, from William Hogarth to James Gillray, depicted black people. They are referred to constantly in art treatises, essays and other literature by theorists and practitioners, in relation to the aesthetics of blackness. Hogarth and Reynolds, for example, both grappled with concepts of beauty and both agreed that the form and colour of the black body was as attractive as that of the white. As Hogarth states, “the Negro who finds great beauty in the black Females of his own country, may find as much deformity in the European Beauty as we see in theirs”.
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