Art of Darkness | Daily Art Blog

Never forget, never again.

Allan Ramsay (attr.), Portrait of an African, c. 1757-60. Oil on canvas, 61.8 x 51.5 cm. Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, Devon, UK.

This portrait, attributed to Scottish painter Allan Ramsay (1713-1784), is believed to be of Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780), who was a composer, an actor, a writer—and the first known Black Briton to vote in a British election.

Sancho was said to have been born a slave on a ship crossing the Atlantic from Africa to the West Indies. Although this is now thought to be unlikely, his origins were African while his earliest memories were of Greenwich, near London, where he was forced to work as a child slave. He persuaded the powerful Montagu family to employ him as their butler, before retiring to run a grocery shop in Westminster.

Sancho composed music, appeared on the stage, and entertained many famous figures of literary and artistic London. The first African we know of to vote in a British election, he wrote a large number of letters which were collected and published in 1782, two years after his death. He was thought of in his age as “the extraordinary Negro”, and to eighteenth-century opponents of the slave trade he became a symbol of the humanity of Africans. 

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Ever the tortured soul.

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Herbert Hoover was the first United States president born west of the Mississippi River. The context surrounding Grant Wood’s portrayal of the presidential birthplace is pretty darn interesting, especially in this moment, as our nation re-enacts the great debate between regionalism (where local interests *trump* all else) and internationalism (a more “cosmopolitan” sensibility).

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loganmaxwellhagege:

The exhibit “Masters of the American West” is coming up at @theautry in February. This painting will be part of the show, “Common Ground” oil 34x42.
#LMHart
#theWest
#theAutry
#mastersoftheamericanwest

In 1611, while on an expedition to find the North-West Passage, explorer Henry Hudson and his son were cast adrift by his mutinous crew. Their fate was unknown but raised the taboo of cannibalism. Collier hints at this by posing Hudson, eerily staring out at the viewer like Dante’s ‘Ugolino’ by Joshua Reynolds, 1773. Incarcerated with his sons, Ugolino eats them to survive, although the act is futile and all eventually die. Here the vast, Arctic landscape remains impassive to a terrifying human drama. Collier’s audience noted its relevance to ongoing Arctic explorations and the search for the North-West Passage. —Tate

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