The Black Image in the English Gaze: Depictions of Blackness in English Art

Abstract

This paper analyzes English art to view the black experience in the eighteenth-century. English painters placed black people into their portraits in various stations of life throughout the period. The fashioning and placement of black people in English art renders for the reader some interpretation how English artists used the black body in their paintings. These images of blacks emerged from the imaginations of white artists; thusly these portraits and prints are not from the black perspective of English society, but a reflection of white attitudes. Therefore, a certain caution exists in any interpretation of the paintings. The inference about the implications of the paintings develops from the gaze of white artists. This paper suggests that an interpretation through English art does reveal something about the status of black people and shed light on satirical explanations of race and sex in eighteenth-century England.