Ignatius Sancho, 1768
Thomas Gainsborough
Oil on canvas
Ignatius Sancho was the first man of African descent to vote in a British election. Born aboard a slave ship crossing the Atlantic, he lived in England from the 1730s. Here, he became a musician, shopkeeper, man of letters and a friend of many artists...This portrait was painted in Bath and is said to have been completed in a single sitting. It remained in Sancho’s possession for the rest of his life.*
Sites of Power
Portraits and presence
In eighteenth-century Britain, artists were working in a society and economy premised on colonial expansion. The decades surrounding the RA’s foundation in 1768 saw the official establishment of British rule in India, and the height of Britain’s Atlantic trade in enslaved African people. Amid daily resistance of enslaved people in British colonies, including powerful rebellions in Jamaica, the movement to end slavery – known as abolition – emerged. RA artists sought to elevate the status of their profession and to establish Britain as a leading artistic centre. They set up art schools and a new Annual Exhibition (the ancestor of today’s Summer Exhibition) to show and sell their work. Art and artists increasingly influenced the public understanding of current affairs via a burgeoning middle class of exhibition visitors.
Gathered here are portraits of Black sitters, many living in Georgian Britain as a result of the vast complex of marine transport that enabled the plantation economy. Ignatius Sancho, who was formerly enslaved, became an influential cultural figure. Research continues into the possible identities of sitters whose names were not recorded. No works by Scipio Moorhead, an artist active in Boston, Massachusetts, survive, but he appears here in a 2007 painting by Kerry James Marshall. As ‘Bust of a Man’ by Francis Harwood signals, classical art and architecture was the guiding example for the RA’s founding members. Recalling Greek and Roman antiquity and revived during the Italian Renaissance, classicism carries connotations of imperial and artistic power.
Enshrined by the RA well into the nineteenth century and beyond, the western classical canon formed accepted public taste in Britain. Through the voices of today’s artists, a recalibration of this entrenched canon is under way.*
From the exhibition
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change
(February - April 2024)
‘Entangled Pasts’ explores connections between art associated with the Royal Academy of Arts and Britain’s colonial histories. At its founding by artists in 1768, under King George III, the institution’s first President, Joshua Reynolds, called the RA an ‘ornament’ to Britain’s empire. For over 250 years, artists and architects active in Britain have experienced and expressed divergent relationships to imperial histories. Individually, through families and via patrons, the links are innumerable and entwined. Today, the legacies of colonial histories continue to form part of the fabric of everyday life, physically and emotionally, across social, economic, cultural and political fields both national and global.
Works of art have always been agents of change, flashpoints of debate and producers of fluctuating meanings. A painting, sculpture, drawing, print, film or poem can act as a powerful lens through which complex situations can be viewed and nuanced understandings of them can emerge. ‘Entangled Pasts’ brings together 100 artworks to explore the role of art in shaping narratives of empire, colonialism, enslavement, resistance, abolition and indenture. An exhibition on this vast and complex subject is necessarily a partial, fragmentary view. Moments of history are refracted through the eyes of artists, especially contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas.
These artworks can represent only a fraction of the institution’s colonial links and the unfolding legacies of British colonialism around the world. Yet, in the visual and conceptual resonances between them, there exists a space for contemplation, inquiry, acknowledgement, reflection, imagination and ongoing conversations..
[*Royal Academy]
Taken at the Royal Academy
Ignatius Sancho, 1768
Thomas Gainsborough
Oil on canvas
Ignatius Sancho was the first man of African descent to vote in a British election. Born aboard a slave ship crossing the Atlantic, he lived in England from the 1730s. Here, he became a musician, shopkeeper, man of letters and a friend of many artists...This portrait was painted in Bath and is said to have been completed in a single sitting. It remained in Sancho’s possession for the rest of his life.*
Sites of Power
Portraits and presence
In eighteenth-century Britain, artists were working in a society and economy premised on colonial expansion. The decades surrounding the RA’s foundation in 1768 saw the official establishment of British rule in India, and the height of Britain’s Atlantic trade in enslaved African people. Amid daily resistance of enslaved people in British colonies, including powerful rebellions in Jamaica, the movement to end slavery – known as abolition – emerged. RA artists sought to elevate the status of their profession and to establish Britain as a leading artistic centre. They set up art schools and a new Annual Exhibition (the ancestor of today’s Summer Exhibition) to show and sell their work. Art and artists increasingly influenced the public understanding of current affairs via a burgeoning middle class of exhibition visitors.
Gathered here are portraits of Black sitters, many living in Georgian Britain as a result of the vast complex of marine transport that enabled the plantation economy. Ignatius Sancho, who was formerly enslaved, became an influential cultural figure. Research continues into the possible identities of sitters whose names were not recorded. No works by Scipio Moorhead, an artist active in Boston, Massachusetts, survive, but he appears here in a 2007 painting by Kerry James Marshall. As ‘Bust of a Man’ by Francis Harwood signals, classical art and architecture was the guiding example for the RA’s founding members. Recalling Greek and Roman antiquity and revived during the Italian Renaissance, classicism carries connotations of imperial and artistic power.
Enshrined by the RA well into the nineteenth century and beyond, the western classical canon formed accepted public taste in Britain. Through the voices of today’s artists, a recalibration of this entrenched canon is under way.*
From the exhibition
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change
(February - April 2024)
‘Entangled Pasts’ explores connections between art associated with the Royal Academy of Arts and Britain’s colonial histories. At its founding by artists in 1768, under King George III, the institution’s first President, Joshua Reynolds, called the RA an ‘ornament’ to Britain’s empire. For over 250 years, artists and architects active in Britain have experienced and expressed divergent relationships to imperial histories. Individually, through families and via patrons, the links are innumerable and entwined. Today, the legacies of colonial histories continue to form part of the fabric of everyday life, physically and emotionally, across social, economic, cultural and political fields both national and global.
Works of art have always been agents of change, flashpoints of debate and producers of fluctuating meanings. A painting, sculpture, drawing, print, film or poem can act as a powerful lens through which complex situations can be viewed and nuanced understandings of them can emerge. ‘Entangled Pasts’ brings together 100 artworks to explore the role of art in shaping narratives of empire, colonialism, enslavement, resistance, abolition and indenture. An exhibition on this vast and complex subject is necessarily a partial, fragmentary view. Moments of history are refracted through the eyes of artists, especially contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas.
These artworks can represent only a fraction of the institution’s colonial links and the unfolding legacies of British colonialism around the world. Yet, in the visual and conceptual resonances between them, there exists a space for contemplation, inquiry, acknowledgement, reflection, imagination and ongoing conversations..
[*Royal Academy]
Taken at the Royal Academy