The National Gallery has
The National Gallery has published a report that links “a
significant part of its collection”, and some of its most famous
donors, artists and paintings to the Atlantic slave trade, said
Craig Simpson in The Daily
Telegraph[1].
Begun in 2018, the study covers the period from the
institution’s founding in 1824 to 1880. It reveals that several
important bequests to the gallery in its early years were made by
those who derived their fortunes in part from slavery. John Julius
Angerstein, whose sale of 38 paintings to the British government in
1824 provided the core of the National
Gallery[2]’s early collection, made
“part of his fortune in insurance for slave ships”; Constable’s The Hay
Wain[3] was donated by a man who
inherited slavery-derived wealth.
Yet the report also names figures whose links to the slave trade
are merely “incidental”, and who had no “direct connection” to it,
such as Thomas Gainsborough, because he painted several portraits
of people who owned West Indian estates; and William Wordsworth,
because his sister’s rented cottage was leased by a slave
owner.
The approach provoked some criticism. “Casting the historic
slavery net as wide as this ensures that hardly anyone can be free
of some links,” remarked Dr Zareer Masani, a historian of the
British empire.
Other specialists complained that the report didn’t go nearly
far enough, said Nadia Khomami in The Guardian[4]. “Acknowledgment is a
very fine thing but it is not a reparation for that crime,”
commented Hakim Adi, professor of the history of Africa and the
African diaspora. “Indeed, I see no mention that the National
Gallery is planning to do anything as a result of this
research.”
A spokesperson clarified that any painting’s connection to the
slave trade would be made explicit on an accompanying picture
caption, to allow visitors to “determine for themselves the nature
and extent of these connections”. However, the museum will not
remove any picture from display on account of its association with
slavery. Further instalments of the study are to follow, tracing
the origins of the gallery’s collection from 1640 to 1920.
References
- ^
The
Daily Telegraph (www.telegraph.co.uk) - ^
National Gallery
(www.theweek.co.uk) - ^
Constable’s The Hay Wain
(www.theweek.co.uk) - ^
The
Guardian (www.theguardian.com)
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