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William Henry Hunt, A Mulatto Girl, Exhibited 1841

A Mulatto Girl

National Gallery of Canada, no. 6840

16 X 12.05 in., 40.7 x 30.6 cm

watercolour and gouache over graphite with scraping out and gum arabic on wove paper

 

Provenance:

Estate of William Leaf (S) Christie's London 8 May 1875, Lot 450 (P) 315 gns. White;

Purchased by the National Gallery of Canada in 1956

 

Exhibited:

Spring 1841, Society of Painters in Water-colours, No. 249 (A Mulatto Girl);

1857, Manchester, England, Exhibition of the Art Treasures of Great Britain, No. 519, as a Mulatto Girl, lent by Wm. Leaf;

1862, London, International Exhibition, No.1054, Head of a Black Girl, lent by William Leaf.

 

The model appears to be the same as the Black Flower Girl in the Sheepshanks collection. While the resemblance is not so strong when compared to Miss Jemima Crow, it is probable that the model is the same for that untraced work as well. The appearance of the original watercolor probably did not translate so accurately in the lithograph from Hunt's Comic Sketches -- several different engravers/lithographers worked on the plates for the 1844 publication with fairly significant degrees of success in the accuracy of the published images.

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Uploaded on March 28, 2012
Taken on September 8, 2005