The Diverse Portrayal of Blacks in Art Throughout the 19th Century

This exhibit will explore the variety of ways that blacks were portrayed in Western art during the nineteenth century. Despite the fact that blacks were viewed as inferior to whites throughout the West, they were not always portrayed this way in art made during the 1800’s. This exhibition moves chronologically across a wide breadth of styles, beginning with neoclassicism and ending with realism. While, many of the paintings conform to the racist attitude held by Westerners during the nineteenth century, some of paintings have aspects that are progressive and others defy expectations with their absolute rejection of popular racist beliefs in the 1800’s. Some paintings such as Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa are far ahead of their time in their portrayal of blacks as white’s equals -- showing blacks as dignified and intelligent.

As governments changed to give citizens more freedom, it became more important to justify enslaving or discriminating against a certain portion of the population. This was the cause for the belief that blacks were scientifically inferior to whites. Many paintings made during the nineteenth century only include blacks for symbolic reasons. In two paintings in this exhibit, this is manifested in the fetisization of black women because they were believed to have larger genitalia and a baser sexual nature. The creation of the photograph in the 19th century marked the beginning of the end of this belief because of its relative objectivity.

Marie Guillemine Benoist, Portrait d'une négresse, 1800, 

Oil on Canvas, The Louvre

In her painting, Portrait d’une négresse, Benoist attempts to join the conversation on whether or not blacks should be treated the same as whites taking place around the time of the French Revolution. The painting was controversial because of its lone black subject; most contemporary paintings only portrayed blacks as extras in paintings and instead focused on the black’s master. Benoist paints her subject in typical slave garb. She is not given a name because Benoist wants her to be representational of all enslaved blacks. Benoist’s painting is also meant to draw attention to the inequality of women, both white and black, in a country supposedly founded on equality. Despite the liberal attitude of this painting, Benoist makes the decision to paint the woman with a bare breast, which is interpreted by some as a reference to black’s hypersexuality. Benoist’s capitulation to the racist tendencies of the west during the 1800’s shows how permeating these beliefs were.

Theodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-1819

Oil on Canvas, The Louvre

The Raft of the Medusa portrays an actual accident that took place when a French ship wrecked in 1816. A life raft started out with one hundred and forty-seven people and ended with only ten survivors after almost two weeks adrift at sea. The painting is significant in the way it portrays blacks because of Géricault’s decision to place a black man at the pinnacle of the pyramid of bodies. Géricault takes advantage of the desperate situation on the raft that makes blacks and whites equal. By putting a black man at the top of the pyramid, Géricault even goes so far as to put blacks above whites, showing the black man’s dominance over the white men below him. The way that the white men are reaching up towards the black man gives the impression for a fleeting second that the white men are worshipping the man on top of the pyramid.

J.T. Zealy, Jack, 1850

Daguerreotype, Peabody Museum of Art, Archeology and Ethnology (Harvard)

Jack is a daguerreotype in a series commissioned by scientists attempting to prove that white’s natural superiority to blacks could be seen in their physical appearance. Though the experiment was prepared in a biased, subjective way, Zealy ensured that the portrait was captured in an objective fashion, taking simple frontal, profile and posterior photos of each subject. While the project set out to prove that blacks were inferior to whites, it seems to have proven the opposite. The scientists who commissioned the daguerreotypes never published their findings, assumably because there was not enough evidence to prove the inferiority of blacks. The objectivity of the photograph made it impossible to portray blacks as anomalies -- disproving the gross exaggerations of drawings like La Belle Hottentot which showed an African American woman with absurdly enlarged buttocks and genitalia and beginning the downfall of the fetishization of blacks in art.

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863 

Oil on Canvas, Museé d’Orsay (Paris)

Manet’s portrait of a French prostitute is rife with sexual symbols. Everything in the painting is meant to have a sexual connotation, including the black woman standing behind the prostitute. Manet uses a black female to represent sexual allure in the same way that Ingres uses a black male in Odalisque with Slave, alluding to the belief that blacks were of a hypersexual nature. Manet sexualizes the painting further by surrounding the black woman with a bouquet of flowers and a black cat. The flowers are an unattached depiction of the prostitute’s genitals that she covers with her hand. The black cat recalls slang for black women’s genitalia. Both of these elements add to the sexualization of both the white woman and the black woman.

Henry Ossawa Taylor, The Banjo Lesson, 1893 

Oil on Canvas, Hampton University Museum

The Banjo Lesson shows the heartwarming scene of a grandfather teaching his grandson how to play the banjo. Tanner was based in France, but painted this scene while visiting his home state of Pennsylvania. This painting is the only one in this exhibit painted by a black artist, and because of this, it portrays blacks more positively than the rest of the paintings. The Banjo Lesson focuses on a specific situation and place in time in an everyday scene. Unlike Benoist’s painting, the grandfather and his grandson are meant to be specific people, avoiding a generalization of all blacks. The skill used to paint the characters and scene of the painting make it obvious that Tanner is attempting to show a specific pair of real people. Through its specificity, the painting intentionally avoids the long running stereotype that blacks who played instruments were only jokes included in minstrel shows.

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream, 1899

Oil on Canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 06.1234

Homer’s The Gulf Stream depicts a black man alone on a battered boat in an ocean filled with sharks and storms. Homer paints the black man holding a rope and a piece of sugarcane, two symbols of slavery. Although the slaves have been set free, Homer points out the fact that blacks in America in the late nineteenth century still have very little hope of ever being truly free and equal. The storm, the sharks, the disrepair of the boat and the ship moving away from the man all serve to symbolize the utterly helpless plight of the black man. Like Géricault, Homer uses the scene of a shipwreck to show blacks in a positive light. Homer portrays the castaway as a strong man, ready to face the oncoming trials awaiting him despite the fact that no help seems within reach.