William Anash Sessarakoo, the son of a slave-trader from West Africa, set off
in the late 1740s on a Grand Tour of Europe. He was kidnapped and sold into
slavery, then after the Earl of Halifax paid his ransom, brought to London
and lauded by society.
Thirty years later, Mai, a Tahitian, talked his way on to a boat returning to
Britain from one of Captain Cook’s voyages. When he arrived, he swaggered
about in court attire while he angled for support and firearms to go back
home and annihilate his neighbours.
Sake Dean Mahomed came from India to Cork in 1784, penned a travel memoir and
married a local girl; then moved to London and specialised in shampooing and
therapeutic massage; then opened the Hindostanee Coffee House in Portman
Square and became the first Indian to sell curry to the English; then became
a bath-house keeper in Brighton.
One can probably hear some strange tales of arrival on the streets of Brixton
and Leicester and Bradford, but you won’t hear tales quite like these, and
this makes Between Worlds, the new show at the National Portrait
Gallery, a very colourful parade indeed. It travels through the 18th and
early 19th centuries looking at portraits of various visitors who became
entangled in Britain’s imperial projects and then alighted on our shores,
and it uses those pictures to consider our changing attitudes to race. For
while Britons of the day might have thought that it was the visitors who
were the objects of scrutiny, the travellers themselves, like a lot of
undercover Gullivers, were also, inevitably, holding up a mirror to their
beholders.
And, while these lives are historical, in revisiting them we are holding up a
mirror once again. According to Sandy Nairne — in what is a rather
astonishing admission for the director of the NPG — it sheds light on the
true nature of the portrait genre: “However beautiful or telling the result,
the circumstance of a portrait is sometimes authoritarian and at worst
exploitative.” It’s an interesting point: you may agree with it, and look
over this show regretting our previous — and maybe our present — lack of
hospitality, or you may disagree and fear another indulgent session of weepy
liberal contrition.
Whatever the conclusion, the stories are extraordinary; so extraordinary, in
fact, that one worries that they may not quite come across in the portrait
material on show. Portraiture is perhaps the least given to narrative of all
fine art’s genres, and one can struggle to see the complexity emerging in
even the best pictures. Reynolds’s 1775-6 portrait of Omai (Mai), for
instance, panders to prejudices, showing him in “native” robes; but without
knowing the context of Mai’s story, one can miss the incongruities in a
genre that is often drawn to dressy extravagance. Thankfully, alongside the
portraits, there is also a great amount of prints, advertisements, books and
even photographs. And the most unlikely objects tell stories: Mai’s stylish
Rococo visiting card, for instance, is a neat rejoinder to Reynolds’s
romanticised portrait of him as a primitive.
One also wonders, though, whether any of this material really merits Sandy
Nairne’s righteous tutting. It is too easy to read back the problems of
modern-day race relations on to portrayals of the past which, for all their
condescension, are often fairly benign. In any case, with some of these
figures, the Maharaja Duleep Singh in particular, one doesn’t quite know
whether to feel pity or envy. Singh’s idyllic childhood came to a bloody end
when he witnessed the murder of his uncle, the Prime Minister, and then saw
the fall of the kingdom to the British. Singh was allowed to inherit his
uncle’s role, but with the British overseeing him, his power was somewhat
token. When he later refused orders he was kidnapped, Anglicised in a
British colonial hill-station, then brought to London, where he became a
popular society figure, a darling of Queen Victoria and, it seems, had a
dandy old time.
It was Victoria who commissioned Singh’s portrait from Franz Xavier
Winterthaler. It’s a flattering piece, but it hides secrets: one assumes
that the exiled ruler must be in full possession of his earthly powers —
he’s easy and comfortable in traditional dress. But, look just below his
chin and you see the symbol of his subservience, the miniature of Queen
Victoria. Then look at the diamonds on his turban and you see jewels that
the British confiscated and held in the Tower and returned to Duleep only
for the purposes of the portrait.
Immigration, even under conditions that were little better than kidnap, could
have a pleasant side. In the case of Sara Baartman, however, it could be
horrendous, and such was the injustice she suffered in death as in life that
one begins to feel a very black shadow cast over our own time — and then one
begins to agree with Sandy Nairne.
Sara, or Saartije Baartman, was a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa who was
brought to London in 1810 by a trader in exotic animals and installed in a
public show in Piccadilly. She was garbed in a transparent dress to ensure
that, as publicity claimed, “the enormous size of her posterior parts are
visible as if the said female were naked”. Inevitably, prints abounded to
display this spectacle, and satirists took her up as well since her fame
coincided with the popularity of a euphemism for the political opposition of
the time, the “Broad Bottoms”. The satires are most dismaying, capturing the
evil brew of hatred, mockery and sexual objectification that exists in
racism down to this day.
Baartman was a vivid individual: she had a sound grasp of English, French and
Dutch, and when her exploiters were hauled into court by the African
Association, charging that she was a victim of slavery, she spoke in court
(though she contended that her submission was willing). The images, however,
show her always lost behind stereotypes that leave her wooden. What is more
dismaying still is that when she was taken to Paris she came to the
attention of Georges Cuvier, the comparative anatomist and pioneer of
“racial science”. After her death, in 1815, her body was dissected by
Cuvier’s colleagues and her remains were preserved in the Musée de l’Homme,
where a cast of her body and skeleton was on display until the 1970s. It was
not until 2002 that they were returned to South Africa at the personal
request of Nelson Mandela.
When it takes that long to right a wrong, we all ought to be looking over our
shoulder, checking our pasts, and wondering what else needs doing. Yet there
are enough other strange and heartening stories in Between Worldsto
provide some reassurance as well.
Between Worlds: Voyagers to Britain 1700-1850, National Portrait Gallery,
London WC2 (www.npg.org.uk 020-7312 2463), from Thur
