Naming Rights:Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sitters of Colour, & Limits of Knowledge

Recent interest in recovering historical images of people of colour by Europeans raises important methodological questions. How can we address the potentials and limits of the traditional art historical toolkit in investigating this type of work? And how can we acknowledge that which may never be known? This paper focuses on two pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds that made their public debut together, hanging as pendants in the Reynolds retrospective at the British Institution in 1813. Each poses a different type of scholarly quandary: one subject has no name; the other, too many. One canvas represents an unidentified Black Briton. In the absence of secure historical data, the subject has been variously attributed: a servant of the artist; Francis Barber, heir to the writer Samuel Johnson; or even George Washington’s cook. Recent discoveries by researchers at the London Metropolitan Archives raise the tantalising possibility that Reynolds’s servant was named John Shropshire. But it remains an object in search of a name, a subject in search of a biography. In contrast, the second canvas represents a securely identified subject, the Polynesian traveller now known as Mai, who bore many names over his lifetime. He came to fame in Britain as “Omai” or “Omiah”, a British misunderstanding of a Tahitian honorific that he reportedly bestowed on himself. Rather than presenting definitive answers, this paper explores how to navigate the limits of historical knowledge in the quest to name pictures and their subjects correctly.

Speaker bios:

Jessie Park is the Nina and Lee Griggs Assistant Curator of European Art at the Yale University Art Gallery. She specialises in early modern Netherlandish art, with a secondary area of expertise in the visual and material culture of global exchange from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. She served as the Rousseau Curatorial Fellow in European Art at the Harvard Art Museums and held curatorial positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Huntington in San Marino, California. Her scholarship has appeared in the Art Bulletin and in an edited volume, Charles V, Prince Philip and the Politics of Succession: Festivities in Mons and Hainault, 1549.

Catherine Roach is an associate professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University, specialising in the art and exhibitions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Her scholarship has appeared in Art History, British Art Studies and the American Art Journal, among others. She has been awarded fellowships by the Huntington Library and the National Humanities Center to support work on her second book, The Shadow Museum: A History of the British Institution, 1805–1867.

Image credit: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of a Man, probably Francis Barber, c. 1770, oil on canvas, 78.7 × 63.8 cm. Private Collection. Photo © The Bloomsbury Workshop, London / Bridgeman Images

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