Slavery and the Possibilities of Portraiture

Pointon, Marcia

doi:10.1017/cbo9781139021845.003

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…"[I]f likeness is immeasurable, how is a subject's identity constructed in a portrait image?" 18 "How and why does one attend to an appearance?" 19 As a consequence of working directly with colonialism's visual remnants in different collections, I have become sensitised to the varying ways researchers and other cultural actors are moved by, and implicated in, the life of an artwork.…”

Section: Black Portraituresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Portraiture as an art form plays out technologies of power and their attendant patterns of anxiety in its modes of production and in its acts of communication." 39 Rachael Pringle Polgreen is a captivating subject, who was employed to hold the attention as an atypical and taboo social figure of the eighteenth century. Her deliberate appearance to London's print buyers facilitated an opportunity to stare, to inspect, to engage the spectacle of her alterity.…”

Section: Black Portraituresmentioning

confidence: 99%

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This is how you see her? Rachael Pringle Polgreen of Barbados by Thomas Rowlandson’s satirical hand

Odumosu

2021

Atlantic Studies

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This study examines the complicated role that works of art play in colonial remembrance, and the ways in which they sustain stereotypes, biases and power relations over the passage of time. It takes as its case study Thomas Rowlandson's hand-coloured etching, Rachel Pringle of Barbadoes (1796), which has been used as visual evidence for the fragmented biography of an Afro-Caribbean entrepreneur, mythologised as a brothel-keeper servicing the British navy, against the backdrop of slavery. Since the story of Rachael Pringle Polgreen (c.1753-1791) is wellknown, I focus on an analysis of the artwork and its unusual composition, speculating reasons for its appearance in London's print culture. Tracing the spectral afterlives of this print, I also argue that the image functions as a colonial keepsake, treasured as evidence of intimate connection between metropole and (post) colony.

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Section: Black Portraituresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Black Portraituresmentioning

confidence: 99%