 Okay, good evening. Welcome everybody. I'm Martin Marrone, head of grants, fellowships and networks at the Paul Mellon Center. Welcome to the third talk in our public lecture series, Georgian Provocations, not as originally planned in Bedford Square and online, but solely online. Thank you for joining us tonight virtually. I'll be introducing us to Chadwick in a moment, but right now there's a little bit of housekeeping to run through. So if we can have the housekeeping slide. Yeah, so the housekeeping slide is mainly about, well, you will be automatically muted when you join the webinar. I can only communicate verbally if the host unmutes you, which can happen during the Q&A session. Although I think we will be sticking with using the Q&A as a way to field questions to Esther. We're planning that talk will last for about 50 minutes and there will be a Q&A session after that. I think you can post questions at any time during the, you can post questions anytime during the talk and we'd suggest that you use the chat box or primarily the Q&A box for questions. The chat boxes for other comments as you're going through or you can ask questions, they will be asking you to redirect them to the Q&A. Importantly, the session will be recorded and no photo should be taken during the session. And this is kind of a general point. Of course, any offensive behavior will not be tolerated and attendees can be removed from the webinar by the host. So key thing about the housekeeping really is do store up your questions, be ready to feed them through the Q&A and we'll be able to have a good session of conversation discussion with Esther at the end. Okay, so as I say, welcome to Georgian Provocations. Each talk in this series centers on an important work of art from the Georgian period, one that was perhaps provocative in its own time and may remain provocative even challenging today. These talks are designed to showcase current and emerging scholarly thinking about the Georgian period, often thought of as a kind of classic or golden age of British art. And in featuring outstanding academics, we hope that there will be a material of interest and insights if you come with a lot of knowledge about the field, but also if you are completely new to this period or new to art history altogether. These are public lectures and no prior art historical knowledge is necessary or assumed. So at the end of tonight's talk, as I've mentioned, we will be taking questions through the Q&A function and whether your question is highly specialized or much more general, do please feel able to put it forwards. Tonight's talk will last about 50 minutes and is provided by Esther Chadwick. Esther is a specialist in 18th century British art. She's just University of Cambridge and completed a doctorate at Yale University in 2016. She has held several prestigious fellows in the US and before joining the Courthold was a curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. She was co-curator of the pioneering exhibition, Figures of Empire, Slavery and Portraiture in 18th century Atlantic Britain at the Yale Center for British Art in 2014 and curator of a revolutionary legacy, Haiti and Toussaint Louverture at the British Museum in 2018. The academic publications include most recently Portraiture in Indigenous London. Mohawks at the British Museum in 1776 published in American Art in the summer of 2022. These and other scholarly outputs reflect the way that Esther has insisted on a more global, culturally expansive and complex understanding of British art of the 18th century while remaining intently focused on the materiality of the art object. I think we will see those qualities demonstrated in her talk tonight, which is entitled A Black King in Georgian London, British Art and Post-Revolutionary Haiti. So over to you, Esther. Thank you so much, Martin. I hope you can hear me okay. I'm just gonna share my screen straight away. Thanks very much for that introduction and thank you to the PMC for having me here this evening and thank you to Danny and Esme behind the scenes on the technology. Thanks to everyone for coming and welcome wherever you may be joining us from. It's really lovely to be able to share this work with you this evening. So I'm just gonna dive straight in. Confident commanding, formally posed yet in a relaxed contraposto. The man standing before us with his gold buttoned tailcoat, silken pantaloons and tassled Hessian boots is Henry Christoph, First King of Haiti. In 1818, seven years into Christoph's reign, this remarkable portrait and its pendant also by Richard Evans, showing Christoph's son, Prince Victor Henry, appeared on the walls of the Royal Academy Exhibition at Somerset House on the Strand in London. Sorry, Esther, one second. We don't see your slides at the moment. Is that intentional? No. Okay, just take a moment to share this. Let me try and share again. Sorry, everyone. Let's share that. Here we go. Okay, desktop. Let's do that. I do apologize. Must see images. This is crucial. Okay. How about that? Let's do that. Right, if you just wanna go into slideshow. Yeah, there we go. Brilliant. Thanks, Esther. Okay, great. I'll just kind of quickly dive back in there. So in 1818, seven years into Christoph's reign, this remarkable portrait and its pendant. Oh, here we are. There. Also by Richard Evans, showing Christoph's son, Prince Victor Henry, appeared on the walls of the Royal Academy Exhibition at Somerset House on the Strand in London. This evening, we're going to start by looking in depth at the two works, examining details of dress, iconography, and art historical models. We'll then consider how it was that the portrait of the Haitian royals ended up on the Academy's walls, paying particular attention to their place within Christoph's own diplomatic strategy. Finally, we'll zoom out from the portraits to think about their relationship to other works in the 1818 exhibition. What I hope we'll gain through this is not just a better understanding of the portraits themselves and what they can tell us about Christoph and his Haitian kingdom, but also perhaps a new way or alternative ways to think about British art in this late Georgian moment. While the entanglements of art with race and empire have become a dynamic and hugely important part of British art studies in the last two decades, the intersections of Christoph's reign and of Haitian history with the history of British art have received hardly any attention at all, certainly not by scholars who would classify themselves as historians of British art. And that's something that I hope we can start to address together today. So let's begin by turning to the paintings themselves. Christoph is shown standing full length beneath a grand classical arch of sandy-coloured stone or stucco. A heavy red curtain with gold braided tassels frames the scene at the top right and left, partially obscuring what looks to be a fluted column. On the table beneath the curtain, covered in a rich brocade, a golden crown set with what looked like pearls topped by a cross, sits on a cushion of red velvet lined with a braided trim and a gold-flect tassel that echoes the larger one above. The lining of Christoph's coat, his fine dark coat, picks up the sumptuous reds of the interior upholstery while his boots, gloves, buttons, cane and the key hanging from his waistband, continue the inflection of alternating red and gold of the whole scheme. The two complementary colours laid out side by side in the feather ribbons of his bicorne hat. This sharp attire would have been familiar to viewers of the painting at Somerset House. Christoph adopts the fashion of regency elites popularised by the likes of George Brummel or Bo Brummel, who you see here in a watercolor of 1805 with the same style of Hessian boots, light pantaloons and blue coat with a U-shaped cut-in. But Christoph's get-up has a more military air thanks to the hat he proffers with his gloved right hand, the bicorne, which had become a staple of army and navy dress in the Napoleonic period. Visitors to the exhibition would have seen another splendid hat of this type in this equestrian portrait by Thomas Lawrence of the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. And this is, I should say, an interesting comparison in another way because Lawrence, it was in Lawrence's studio that Richard Evans, the artist responsible for Christoph's portrait, learned to paint, but more on him later. Behind Christoph, beneath a brooding sky, it's billowing clouds tinged with the red of morning or evening, perhaps after a storm, stretches a verdant plain, a column of smoke rises in the middle distance and a ray of sunlight glints on the sea, just visible on the horizon line, created from a band of creamy gray paint laid on in a single stroke of a dry brush. Christoph's countenance is stern, but there's a glint in his eye, a small dab of white paint. His hair is graying, but he's vigorous, a man of 50 or so. Christoph had been born in the Caribbean in 1767, probably in Grenada, although whether to enslave or to free black parents is unclear. So I'm showing you a contemporary map here, an 18th century map here of the Atlantic Ocean and the arrows, which I hope you can just about make out, appointing to Sandamang, Future Haiti and Grenada. After spending his early life moving between the Caribbean islands and fighting at the age of 12 for the French in the American War of Independence, he returned to what was then colonial Sandamang to work in the town of Le Cap in the north as a waiter and later as the manager of a local hotel. During the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 as an uprising of enslaved men and women against the French colonial regime, Christoph rose through the ranks under Toussaint Louverture to become one of Louverture's closest generals. When Jean-Jacques Desolines was assassinated after independence in 1806, Christoph became leader of the country in 1807 after civil strife rent the new nation in two. He declared himself president for life in the north. And in 1811, he crowned himself king in a magnificent coronation ceremony in the town of Le Cap on the island's northern coasts, the town that he renamed Cap Henry. Over the coming years, Christoph set about the task of rebuilding an economy from the ashes of slavery, implementing a strong legal code governing the management of land and labor and establishing an impressive system of public education throughout the kingdom. When Baron Duvati, Christoph's prolific court secretary, dedicated his book, The Colonial System Unveiled, a founding text of what the historian Marlene L. Doubt has called the tradition of black Atlantic humanism. When he dedicated this text to the king in 1814, he hailed Christoph as quote, among the first of the Haitian heroes to take an axe to the ancient tree of slavery and colonial despotism. After having played such a vital role in toppling it, but he continued, your majesty is the one who has destroyed every last root of it. It was no accident that Christoph adopted the phoenix, the mythical bird who rises from the ashes to new life as his symbol. Even the imposing buildings of his reign, such as the Citadel Henry, part of a system of fortification in the kingdom against possible French invasion, were literally constructed from bricks taken from dismantled plantation buildings. Christoph, in his picture, could be standing at the Citadel which enjoyed a splendid vantage over the surrounding terrain, or we may be in one of the rooms of the Palace of Saint-Sucie built in the same period. In the upper left corner of the painting, you can partially see Christoph's coat of arms that appear to have been embroidered on the curtain. The wings of his phoenix are just visible against the azure shield. This page from a remarkable, extraordinary manuscript now in the College of Arms in London, which meticulously details the coats of arms given to members of the noble order of princes, cons, dukes, barons and chivaliers created by Christoph soon after his rise to power, gives a clear a sense of the design of these arms. Beneath the phoenix is a scroll with the words je renais de mes anges, I rise from my ashes. Above the shield is Christoph's royal crown, the very crown represented on the table below. Beneath it on a pink banner is Christoph's motto, Dieu m'a cause et mon épée, God my cause and my sword. Around the shield is the chain of the Royal and Military Order of St. Henry, a chivalric order instituted by Christoph in 1811 for an elite society of loyal subjects whom he wished to honour for their zeal and fidelity to the crown. And another reference to the order is found in the badge that you can see pinned to the left breast of Christoph's coat. This is the star of the order of St. Henry, which, if you could really zoom in on the painting, seems to have contained another rendition of the phoenix at its centre. We see that same star in the portrait exhibited at the RA as a pendant to Christoph's, showing his youngest son and heir, Jacques Victor Henry. You might notice that using different terms for Jacques Victor Henry. On the slide I've been using, my captions are actually replicating the titles that were given to these paintings in 1818 in London at the Royal Academy. The Prince Royal was not even a teenager at the time of his sitting for this painting, but here in almost identical dress, he has made a miniature version of the King. The poses of father and son echo one another. They face towards each other across an imaginary axis of symmetry that makes the portraits work formally as a pair and at the same time reinforces the idea of the male hereditary principle that underpinned and was intended to give stability to Christoph's new regime. While Christoph's sports a golden key, perhaps used to lock a case containing documents or other precious objects, Jacques Victor Henry wears a little golden fob attached with a pink ribbon, probably containing an intaglio seal with his crest or insignia. And thanks to Martin Possil for sharing an image of the sorts of objects that we're talking about here. While Christoph occupies an interior space, his son is framed by a lush canopy of vegetation that places him emphatically outdoors. Scale operates strangely in this picture. The 12 year old prince towers over the Palomino horse who stands definitely behind him. While another figure, a servant probably, who seems to be holding the prince's bicorn hat, looms up from a slope of grass at left. And here I'd just like to make a special shout out to Aura Diaz at the University of Puerto Rico for being so generous with her time and sharing this detail, this close up image with me. One of Christoph's surviving letters to his son this very same year, 1816-ish when the actual paintings were painted, tides him for not applying himself diligently enough to his studies, yet grants him permission, quote, by way of recreation, to take your horse and come to visit the work of the Citadel Henry. Though perhaps the scene evoked here is one such outing. Attached to the flounce of his horse's saddle, this curious golden or brass cylinder is most likely a pocket telescope of the kind that became popular in Britain in the early 19th century, like the ones that you can see here. The presence of this optical device establishes a sense of Jacques Victor, not just as a looked at by us, the audience of the painting, but as himself a viewer of his surroundings. He's out riding to cast his eyes over the lands over which his father rules, the same extended gaze implied by the vast perspective view that stretches away behind the king. The leopard skin flounce from which the telescope hangs is highly reminiscent of the saddle blankets that became customary for British hasars or light cavalry officers. After troops of the British army first brought back the spotted hides from India, like this 20th century example now in the National Museum, at the National Army Museum. We see the same kind of leopard skin in other British equestrian portraits of the period like John Hopner's portrait of the Duke of Wellington, shown here from a print, or Joshua Reynolds grand equestrian portrait of George IV when Prince of Wales in 1784. These portraits are just two among numerous examples that we could look at to make the point that Evan's portraits of the Prince and King Henry draw emphatically on a tradition of European grand manner portraiture, particularly as developed in Britain in the 18th century in the work of Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Lawrence. The Prince's pose with his left arm leaning casually on the horse seems to be lifted straight from the playbook of Joshua Reynolds, which ultimately goes back to Van Dyke. Likewise, Lawrence's state portraits of George III and the fourth with their classical arches, theatrical curtains and tables at left provide the basic model for Evan's portrait of Henry, even if the simpler attire stripped back some of the baroque excess of feathers and capes. I should also say that the Haitian portraits, although they are full lengths, they're not actually life-sized, they're about half life-sized. So in fact, they would appear diminutive in comparison to these other precedents. So in a sense, the scale of my slide is reversing what is the case in reality. That Evan should be looking to this tradition is entirely unsurprising, given that he trained under Lawrence. He was known for doing drapery work and for studio copies for Lawrence. These are just a few examples of the pictures by Lawrence that Evans himself would go on to finish later. These are later works, of course. And on the right is Evan's copy of Lawrence's self-portrait. One observer related in 1830, that Evans was much in satis confidence, has a tenacious memory and has a vast store of interesting anecdotes about him. In fact, he knows more of his life than any man alive. He lived six years in his house. So Evans was highly conscious of the tradition in which he was working in 1818, even as the paintings were made geographically at a very far removed from London. Yet at the same time, the portraits of King Henry Christophe and Prince Victor affect a complex intervention into grandmana portraiture. And in particular, the racialized dynamics that underpinned it. I'm alluding to works like these by Van Dyke and Reynolds, building on a visual trope that goes back to the 16th century in Italy, which in the gestures and relative positions of their principal sitters, inscribe at the level of the visual a regime of white supremacy. And I just wanna take this opportunity to highlight the amazing work that's just been done on Reynolds portrait of Charles Stanhope that you can see on the right of the screen here. New archival work has actually uncovered the identity of Stanhope's servant as Marcus Thomas. So in effect undoing the anonymity that has been cast over this figure, ever since the picture was exhibited in the RA in 1783. It's a really amazing discovery and a really wonderful moment for this painting. Works like Van Dyke's Henrietta of Lorraine in the words of Adam Eker in his brilliant new book on the artist, articulated the basic dynamic through which relations of colonial subjugation would take visual form in portraiture for the next two centuries or so. Even as something like Charles at the Hunt reminds us that the presence of servants, courtiers or attendants as secondary figures was not always structured according to racial difference. The presence of the second figure in the princess portrait certainly evokes this old tradition but the historical context of Evan's image is radically different. Prince Victor was heir to a kingdom that was conceived explicitly in terms of black power. Is he not the one finally wrote the Baron de Vathe in 1814 who eradicated slavery's last roots by making the shadow of the white man disappear? The very image of Christophe and Prince Victor as sovereign and heir as the central subjects within the frame make the claim at the visual level that Christophe and his secretaries were articulating in their kingdom's constitution and other writings. We may look to France for an image that affects similar reversals and reformulations. Giroudet's famous portrait of the Senegal born deputy Jean-Baptiste Bellet who'd traveled to Paris to represent Saint-Domingue the future Haiti at the National Convention in 1794 which asserts Bellet's freedom, his belonging as a man of rights to the French Republic and replaces him on the same level as the white bust of the philosopher Renal noted for his liberationist and anti-colonial ideas. Evans' portraits are perhaps less cerebral and I think it's fair to say they're less self-conscious about what's going on but they're no less powerful as statements of the revolutionary ideas that carried a man like Bellet to France. Christophe and his courtiers, however, knew exactly what was at stake in representation's reversals. The Palace of Saint-Sucie was decorated according to contemporary accounts with scenes from classical mythology in which the protagonists were depicted with black skin. As Abate put it, we esteem a black skin more beautiful than a white one. Our Haitian painters depict the deity and angels black while they represent devils white. I said just a moment ago that Evans' pictures were painted at a geographical far removed from London. So where were they painted? Well, neither Christophe nor the Prince Royal ever visited Europe and remained firmly in the Caribbean. In fact, the artist traveled to them. Sometime around 1816, as part of Christophe's ambitious campaign to establish educational institutions throughout the kingdom, he founded what was described as a school of drawing and painting at Saint-Sucie. In the summer of 1816, the African-American teacher, scholar, diplomat and author, Prince Saunders, was in London on Christophe's behalf and negotiated to send Richard Evans to Haiti where he would become the art school's inaugural director. And note that this frontispiece portrait of Saunders is actually based on a painting by Evans. I think, and please correct me if I'm wrong, anyone who knows this, I think the original is lost, but the portrait must have been painted while the two men were in London around 1816. Why Evans was chosen by Christophe and by Prince Saunders is not recorded. The diary of the art world gossip, Joseph Farrington, records that another artist in contention for Christophe's patronage was the sculptor Charles Rossi. You might know Rossi's work from the front of New St. Pancras Church on Euston Road, anyone who lives in London. Rossi expressed, this is Farrington here, expressed much willingness to engage in this business, having of late been very unfortunate in being without a professional commission for a year and a half past. So basically he's down on his luck and he needs work. Whether Evans' motivations for seething this opportunity may have been similar, we don't know, but Farrington recorded later that month that Saunders had advanced 500 pounds to Evans on Christophe's behalf. A letter from Christophe of November, 1816 noted, that Mr. Evans, the teacher of drawing and painting, is established at Saint-Sussis and his school is also functioning. Beyond this, there are no other details of Evans' day-to-day work in Haiti that I know of or how the school functioned and what exactly was taught. So it was in Haiti that Christophe and Jack Victor Henry sat for Evans. But how did the paintings, which are today housed in the Josephina del Toro Fulladosa Rare Books and Manuscript Collection at the University of Puerto Rico, how did they end up on the walls of the Royal Academy in London in 1818? The answer lies in Christophe's carefully cultivated contacts with prominent British abolitionists, notably Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, whom he saw as crucial allies in his campaign for international recognition. In turn, the abolitionists saw in Christophe an opportunity to garner support for their cause and proof of the viability of black leadership after slavery. On November the 18th, 1816, Christophe wrote to William Wilberforce from the Palace of Saint-Sussis and this is him speaking here. I received and approved my friend with feeling, avec sensibilité, he was actually writing in French, this is a translation. Your portrait that you sent to me. I long to possess the features of one of our most virtuous friends. In return and according to your wishes, I am sending you mine and that of my son, the Prince Royal, which I had painted by Mr. Evans. So the portraits were the result of a calculated exchange of gifts, acting not just as representations of, but as representatives for their subjects in an Atlantic crossing of goodwill and solidarity. The canvases were rolled up and you might think back to their smaller size here, they were rolled up and shipped across the Atlantic to Wilberforce, who must have arranged for their exhibition at the academy. Wilberforce was one of the guests at the official dinner held to celebrate the opening of the exhibition that year. So he's very much part of the academy world. Indeed, the summer exhibition wasn't just an art show, it was itself a diplomatic event. As the list of royalty attending the private view makes clear. Christophe too understood the diplomatic function of portraiture. He also had a copy of Evans picture sent to the Tsar of Russia, presumably as part of his campaign to woo the European sovereigns at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in the autumn of 1818. And it's that version, the version that he had done for the Tsar of Russia that is today in the Musée Nationale du Pontillon Haitien in Port-au-Prince, in Haiti. Because here is the rub, despite the Haitian revolution having been concluded with independence in 1804, neither the revolution nor Haiti were recognized as legitimate or sovereign by the European powers. In the essay that I suggested as reading to accompany this lecture, Habatha Macintosh and Gregory Piero have argued convincingly that Christophe's cultivation of British artists and craftsmen was a vital part of his strategy to gain official recognition by the British state, which would in turn lead to diplomatic recognition of the kingdom among the other sovereigns of Europe. Representations of Henry has produced an exchange between Haiti and Great Britain in a variety of forms, they write, as coins, medals and portraits, but also anecdotes, stories and rumors helped assert Haiti as a viable partner in the trade of concrete material goods, but also in the exchange of cultural capital. End quote. Christophe consciously used the visual arts as a way of asserting his presence and to make his claim on a place among the world powers in the years of the so-called concert of Europe, a series of diplomatic conferences, including the Congresses of Vienna and Aix-les-Chapelle, when the international political order was being reconstituted in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Here is a selection of surviving objects made in England for Christophe's court and these are really amazing, amazing things, including a personalized dinner service from the Spode Manufactory, coinage made by Matthew Bolton at the Soho Manufactory in Birmingham and also by Thomas Wyon, the chief engraver of the King of England Seals and at the bottom, this magnificent gilt bronze ice pail bearing those same royal arms that we looked at on the curtain in Evan's portrait. One reviewer of the 1818 exhibition described the portraits as uncommonly good pictures that, and here I'm very much using the contemporary language, the language of 1818, that prove it is not impossible and not impossible to attach pomp and dignity even unto a negro. They really look like very king-like personages. Among that is press coverage and as always with the Royal Academy exhibition, there was lots and lots written about it in the newspapers. This is the only passage that I found that responds directly to Evan's paintings. But it suggests that to some at least, they were successful, the paintings were successful as avatars for Kristoff and his kingdom in the way that he might have hoped, even if their reception was premised on the very prejudice, the racism that he and his fellow Haitians decried. Before I move on to the final part of the lecture, I do want to acknowledge a really important point about Kristoffian aesthetics more broadly. Despite the vigor of his appropriation of European forms and his strategic linkages to British art in particular, Kristoff and his court cultivated conscious references to Africa and to the indigenous history of Haiti that were an equal part of his assertion of power. Long before the Haitian Revolution, European images of black kings were mobilized and signified differently in the early modern Americas. For example, among other black saints and biblical figures, the black mages known in the Americas from prints like this one and works in other media derived from them was venerated by members of black confraternities. These religious organizations became key sites for the performance of black royalty in the diaspora. Kings and queens elected from among enslaved and free blacks in Afro-Catholic coronation ceremonies hosted by the confraternities, notably in 18th century Brazil and as early as the 16th century in Mexico became alternative loci of power outside colonial authority whose function was in the words of Miguel Valerio who's recently written a book all about these ceremonies. To recall, to keep Africa alive in the collective memory and in so doing to honor their ancestors. As much as they may signal his desire for legibility in European terms, the newly created heraldic orders of Christoph's kingdom like the stars and phoenixes that are recorded as covering his coronation regalia may also be viewed in light of the election of royal orders and ranks of nobility that became the norm in African derived festival culture in the Americas. The point is that the aesthetics of Christoph's kingship may be viewed as part of the continuum with African diasporic culture elsewhere in the Americas in which European forms signaled not simply a desire to connect with European culture but were also pointed and poignant signs of a distinctive African-ness. This is a really, really crucial point but it's the subject of another lecture or another series of lectures. For today, I want to stay in London and think more about the presence of the portraits at Somerset House. How were the paintings displayed? How were viewers encouraged to experience them? Over the past few weeks, we've seen this image flash up on screen a few times, a view of the great room at Somerset House from 1787, from the exhibition that year. You can see the then president of the RA, Joshua Reynolds in the foreground showing the Prince of Wales around the room. Top lit by huge dioclesion windows, the painted ceiling and with a painted ceiling that evokes the oculus of the pantheon in Rome and I don't know if you can make it out but in the margin of the print are the words that were actually inscribed above the door to the great room, let no stranger to the muses enter here in Greek. We heard from Paris and from Martin about the ways artists jostle for prime position on the line where their pictures would be most prominent. In 1818, one critic called the exhibition a monstrous mass of matter confused and heterogeneous and another noticed the prevalence of portraits, the large room crowded with offerings to individual feeling. Highlights of the great room in 1818 included works by Thomas Stottard, George Dahl and Augustus Wool-Coolcut and these images they're not the actual works displayed, I couldn't get images of those but these give you a good sense of their contributions. Thomas Lawrence's portrait of the Duke of Wellington that we saw briefly earlier was placed directly above Turner's door. Benjamin West's monumental rendition of Lord Clive receiving the grant of the Diwani, the right to collect taxes from the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam was another touchstone in the great room. One reviewer wrote that where a large picture occurs it is garnished around the edges with faces like a turbot with smelts, a turbot and even has a whimsical effect. So you've got a picture, a big flat fish on a platter surrounded by lots of little fish around the edges. Along the top of Mr West's treaty between the Grand Mughal and Lord Clive there are six or eight portraits a row resembling a battalion or at least a Grenadier company in line. So again, you have to imagine this grand imperial canvas surrounded on all sides by smaller probably bust length portraits. Evan's portraits of Henry Christoph and his son were not actually shown in the great room. The catalogue tells us that in fact they were placed in what was known as the School of Painting or Inner Room and that's the space at the top left of this plan. This space had been converted in 1811 on the suggestion of Turner from what was originally the top floor apartment of the Academy's secretary. Again, this is William Chambers original plan and you can see the great room, exhibition room in the middle and just off to the side at the top left the apartments that became the School of Painting accessed from the northwest of the great room or directly from the corridor at the top of the stairs. Although not as prestigious as the great room this smaller space made for more intimate viewing conditions as Tom Adel has discussed in a really interesting essay from the PMC's Chronicle of the RA for 1828. Some artists might even find this smaller room more desirable as a location for their work. Certainly it did nothing to prevent William Hilton's Oona and the Satyrs from garnering glowing press attention in 1818. The exhibition catalogue is revealing. Entries were listed in roughly the order in which they were displayed so it gives us a good idea of what was hung next to what and so here you can see I've highlighted Evan's portraits which was surrounded by a mix of other portraits history paintings, still lifes and landscapes. You can see that Harlow's the virtue of face was displayed somewhere nearby and it was accompanied in the catalogue by lines from the Gospel of St. Luke. But what interests me most about this display is this, is this, there we go. Somewhere in between the two Haitian portraits was Turner's Field of Waterloo. I hope you can make this out on your screens just about. It's a difficult picture to capture photographically because of its notably gloomy tonality, its deliberate murkiness and jarring contrast between the explosion of a rocket in the sky and the piles of torch-lit bodies on the ground. Turner has us looking down over the battlefield towards the burning shell of the Chateau of Ugumon, the defensive position that Wellington believed to have been crucial for the British victory over the French. In the foreground, a group of mourning women attends a mass of tangled bodies with limbs, helmets, uniforms, upturned carts, a battle drum and fallen horses congealing into the effect of what the art historian Leo Costello has called an open wound or viscera stilling out onto the ground. This was supposed to be a mighty British victory over Napoleonic France, but Turner's image of the battle is far more ambivalent. As we saw from the catalogue, he accompanied the painting with lines from Byron's child Harold in which battles magnificently stern array disintegrates into earth covered thick with other clay. Bodies are subsumed in turn by earth, rider and horse, friend, foe, in one red burial blend. It's all very, very cheering stuff. Turner's painting was emphatically not a heroic representation of British victory, like this earlier sensation piece at the RA, Benjamin West's death of General Wolfe, in which the hero's body remains almost perfectly intact, the distinction between Victor and vanquished abundantly clear. The field of Waterloo staged the dissolution of the military hero, just as it visualized the breaking down of the heroic equestrian portrait, where the body of this horse that you can just make out in the detail at left with its Hussars saddle blanket, just like the one in the portrait of the Prince Royal, disappears into a pile of twisted arms and legs. For good reason, Turner's painting has been described as a critique of the ravages of war. What are we to make then of the juxtaposition of the field of Waterloo with the two portraits of the Haitian King, Henry Christophe and the Prince Royal? What does this ensemble amount to? There may have been a kind of surface politics in play in the decisions of the Hanging Committee. Waterloo represented a final defeat of the sworn enemy of Haiti and Christophe, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had long attempted to thwart the Haitian Revolution as a threat to his authority. In 1801, Napoleon sent a military expedition to Saint-Domingue with secret instructions to his brother-in-law, General Leclerc, to in these famous lines often quoted, riddice of these gilded Africans, to commandeer or kill the black leaders and restore slavery and the old colonial order. It was at that point that Christophe, then one of Toussaint Louverture's generals and in charge of the town of Le Cap, set his own home and the rest of the town on fire so as to leave nothing for the French to find. Here's a French print from that period showing the younger Christophe as the incendiaire de la vie du Cap, so the burner of Le Cap. This event is one of the reasons why the phoenix that he later adopted as his royal symbol was quite so potent. Christophe quite literally rose from his ashes. So on one level then, next to an evocation of Waterloo, the images of the Haitian Revolutionary King and his son might be subsumed into a larger narrative about victory over Napoleon. Yet we've seen with its formal strategies of fragmentation and disintegration how Turner's painting works emphatically against the ideology of triumph. The field of Waterloo was as much a painting about the limits of representation as about the subject of Waterloo itself. It was, again, as Leo Costello has argued, an acknowledgement that the aesthetic models which had succeeded for West, for Benjamin West, were no longer sufficient. What was being mourned in Turner's painting was less the loss of historical and artistic cohesion and unity as such and more the loss of the conditions of production for creating the illusion of that wholeness, for the conditions that made that illusion possible. Turner's picture, in other words, was about the inadequacy of traditional genres of art, in this case, history painting, as a coherent, unified narrative whole as it had been theorized by Joshua Reynolds at the Royal Academy, to meet the demands of the present, the inability of old artistic norms to contain new realities. Evans' portraits of the Haitian king and his son offered their own answers to these questions. Christof's new order with a radically anti-colonial, anti-slavery black king as its figurehead actively insisted on its compatibility with, its ability to be assimilated into existing forms of representation. Christof's strategy for the recognition of a sovereign Haiti as a beacon anti-colonial state involved a deliberate adoption or co-option of and assertion into the long gallery of portraits by Lawrence Reynolds Van Dyke as we've seen. Contrast the bodily integrity of Christof with the breaking down of the body in Turner. Look again at the equestrian image of Prince Victor and its collapse at Waterloo. For all the revolutionary history that brought them into being, for all the complex reversals of racialized expectation in the eyes of British beholders that we considered earlier, Evans' portraits seem at least on one level to want to leave the old tradition unruffled and intact. Scholars have described what Turner was doing as trying to depict the unthinkable, that is to show the ultimate vulnerability of the soldier's body, the flattening reality of war whose losses make neither side a victor. But for anyone dealing in the study of Haitian history, this idea of the unthinkable, the impossibility of something to be tamed into graspable representation, whether visual or verbal, has very particular associations. In its challenge, not just to the old monarchical regime, but to the whole idea of enslavement and oppression based on racial difference, it was arguably the Haitian Revolution which gave rise to the first self-proclaimed black state in the Americas that was the really unthinkable event of this period as Michel Rolfe Truro famously discussed in his book, Silencing the Past, even as the revolution's progress and protagonists were frequently in the news in Europe and even as Britain now maintained at least a fragile acceptance of Christoff, though not, as we said earlier, an official recognition through its trade relations with the kingdom. Although Christoff looked to Britain as leading the way in abolitionist politics in Europe, and although Britain had abolished the transatlantic trade in 1807, it still maintained the system of plantation slavery in its colonies and was a very long way from actually accepting the revolution's implications. So prompted by the presence next to it of King Henry and the Prince Royal, could we think about the Haitian Revolution as somehow haunting Turner's painting? Is it possible? And I guess this is the kind of provocation part of my lecture. Is it possible to consider the ways that the ultimate threat, the ultimate critique of Britain's status quo that was represented by the Haitian portraits was sublimated by their seemingly conventional forms, but at the same time could be displaced onto or resurfaced by Turner's canvas? At the very least, I think the 1818 ensemble forces us to confront these words in terms of each other. They each raise questions about the meeting of old forms and new realities. While Turner's painting offered a critique of war, the portraits through the affirmation and honoring of Christoff's kingship ultimately presented a critique of empire, even as they deliberately asserted their belonging to a tradition of British culture and a form of visual continuity with the past. While the one signaled a breakdown of heroic history painting, the portrait showed how old forms could take on radically new meanings. So thank you very much. And I'll just stop my sharing now. Thank you, Esther. This is the point where Zoom becomes slightly odd because there would be, if we were alive, would be resounding applause from a very large audience. I don't know if you saw, but this evening, we've had about 120 people in the audience, about 119 in the room at any one time. I wanted to be able to have come on, God. And they're from North Carolina to Cornwall and Arizona to Birmingham. So a global audience, fittingly, a global and Atlantic audience for such a fascinating talk. As anticipated, very close scrutiny on the objects but also opening up a huge vistas about political change and the role of art and representing the possibilities of change and a kind of a global canvas that these pictures are kind of painted on, as it were. So thank you so much for that. Very welcome. For everybody else, there have been various kind of notes of compliments and applause. People are you, very, yeah. People doing clever things with their icons. So the applause is there. But this is the chance where we have to talk a little bit further for everybody in the audience. If you've got questions, if you've got comments, whether they're small, whether they're big, do come forward. There's a few lined up already, so I will turn to them momentarily. But use the Q&A box at the bottom of the screen there to post thoughts or questions for Esther, as I say. Ender, no question is too small. No question is too big to person three. But just to kind of start things off, and this is picking up on a couple of points that Lucy Pelts from the National Portrait Gallery in London has put in the Q&A as well, which is the question, you've touched on this a number of times. These are not very big pictures, right? A meter high, something like that? Yeah, they're about a meter high. And I don't know if Aura Diaz from the University of Puerto Rico might be with us tonight. She said she might, but she could tell us because she's actually taken me through her museum stores with a Zoom camera and showing me the pain things where they are now. And yeah, I think about a meter high. So they're kind of about half life size, I think that's about accurate. I mean, that's the sort of size of canvas that you might expect, I don't know if it's a three-quarter or a half-life, you might expect a life-size portrait, depending on that, but these are full-length portraits which are kind of reduced in size to fit in that smaller canvas. So, I mean, the point that Lucy was raising was about whether there are, I think suggesting that there may be full-size or larger full-lengths in Haiti in the cathedral or somewhere else. And so the question to you is, do you think that these two works, are these the finished works as it were? Are these the works as intended or are they copies or versions or...? So these are absolutely the prime versions that were painted in that exchange with Wilberforce. These are the first versions that Evans paints and I can't off the top of my head remember the dimensions of the version that's now in Haiti. The version that's now in Haiti is definitely the object that was painted for the Tsar of Russia. And I imagine that that is the same size as these, but I just need, I need to double check that I'm not, I don't know if I've even got something like that to hand right this second, but we could check that. But these are certainly the prime version. Yeah, the pair that came first and then the copies were made after. So how do you explain the scale? I mean, you mentioned, we didn't put it in these terms, but postal costs, right? If you're gonna send the pictures to exhibition in London, then they're... But I mean, how do you explain that? And in relation to that, do you have a sense of the availability of materials in Haiti at this point? I mean, presumably Evans would have gone out with a, you know, not a truckload, but a whole load of materials and canvases with them or were our materials readily available there anyway? It's a really, really interesting question. I mean, Evans would most likely have taken materials with him, but as I alluded to, there were certainly artists working in Haiti at the palaces for Christophe already, like Francisco Velasquez, who was an artist from neighboring Santa Domingo, the eastern part of the island, who decorated the palace with the mythological scenes. So there's certainly artists already established in Haiti and working and there would have been artist materials, I think, available in the Caribbean more broadly, but I'm sure that Evans would have taken supplies with him. Perhaps he took canvas and perhaps that might be connected to the size of these. It's a really interesting one about the scale. I was, of course, my first sort of impulse was to say, oh, that has to do with the fact that they were always destined to be sent across the Atlantic. They were always destined for transit. And we know from the work of, the wonderful work of Jennifer Roberts about pictures that already encode their future, travel through dimensions or formal qualities. So there's sort of that in there. Although I think I had a chat with Martin Possell about this and I think that they're not entirely unprecedented, this kind of scale that artists, I think, maybe write of Derby does full lengths that are half full lengths, but not full size. So there's some precedent there as well in British art. It's a really interesting point. And just where were there ever, were there prints produced at the time? Do you think that was ever part of the plan in terms of the sort of notable figure, a global figure? Well, I don't know of any prints made of these paintings. I would love it if anyone does. I haven't come across them. There were images of Christophe, other printed images of Christophe in circulation. And am I able to re-share screen to show one? Should be, but they should be. Do you mind? Hang on, let me just do that. I just do that. And then whiz through, hang on. Oh, I don't wanna hold this all up, but if I just got a few extra bits and pieces down the bottom here, oh, here we go. This is bonus content, isn't it? Yeah, bonus content for the podcast. So this is an Italian print made in 1818. And as you can see, it's quite a derogatory representation of Christophe. It was produced for an Italian book. And it sort of pieces together elements of Evan's picture in some ways, the sort of position and pose of the king in some ways, but has him kind of subduing a crowd of sort of massive people behind him. And it clearly sort of implies that Christophe is a sort of upstart imitation of Napoleon essentially, which was one of the many tropes about Christophe that was circulating textually. So this is one printed image that was circulating at the time. And there were, before Evan's portraits, before this 1818 date, Christophe had appeared visually in a publication by Marcus Ramesford, who was a British soldier who had been in Haiti, been in Sandamang. But none of the representations, except for Evan's, were actually ever taken from the life. So Evan's is the only lifetime portrait done from the life. Right. Okay, I can see that there are some questions and comments lining up in the Q&A, which I should turn to now. Starting with something posted by Catherine Roche. Hello, Catherine. Thank you for this brilliant talk, Exclamation Mark. I'll start with that, because that's in the quote. Can you say more about the attendant figure in the Prince's portrait and how this figure invokes and recasts Grand Manner's conventional racialized hierarchies? Yeah, I really wonder about that. Hi, Kate. So again, shall I share with that, be helpful to go back to that image? Yeah, okay, let's do that. Wait one second. I'll just go back. I'm afraid I've got to kind of skip through everything because I can't use... Actually, I might be able to do that. Okay, can you still see my screen? Okay, great. So where are we? Let's go back to that detail. Well, the two images together even, maybe. Yeah, here we go. Oh yeah, okay, that's it. So yeah, so he definitely appears. So he's kind of, it's very... I said the scale is quite strange here. So he's sort of looming up from behind a slope and he's holding... I presume he's holding the Prince's hat and we presume he's a servant, although I have come across one reference and I don't know what the evidence is for this that he could represent Christoph's illegitimate son but I'm not sure about that at all. I think that the implication visually here is that he's a servant. And again, if we then compare it to say that, I mean, this is a really, really complex comparison, I think because on one hand you have something like John Manor's Markets of Granby, the Reynolds painting and that adopts this very traditional classic implication of principal white sitter raised up above a quote unquote subservient black servant who is secondary within the composition. But then the kind of root image of this, the question with servants is the Van Dyke which is not racialized in quite the same way at all. So Endymian Porter is Charles I's kind of very intimate courtier there and another servant in the background. So in terms, there's something going on obviously with the evidence portrait and I've kind of described it as a scrambling or a kind of reversal, but I think it is, in terms of that tradition, the question of race and racialization is really quite complex indeed. Because the servant figure seems, he's very low in the canvas, isn't he? I mean, he's sort of disappearing almost literally over the horizon. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I mean, I guess in the Van Dyke you kind of have a recession, but he's even more, again, that sort of quite vertigo like scale of principle subject. And then the servant push to the background is really notable. But again, we have to think about Kristoff's kingdom as at once a kingdom of black power, absolutely. And a kind of anti-slavery ideology, but at the same time a place that maintains certain quite extreme hierarchies. And Kristoff was very keen to assert his authority and his parent. So that's very much in play in this image too. Let's move on, we've got a question. It's a small question, but something which opens up quite a big topic really from Robert Gifford. What happened to father and son afterwards? This is them in 1818, making a fake to authority. Well, what happened afterwards? Yeah, well, this is a really, really kind of amazing and complex story. Essentially, by 1820 the kingdom was over because by that date Kristoff's authority was undermined and he was essentially toppled by the rival Southern Republic and he commits suicide, fearing a coup, he commits suicide. And 10 days later, Prince Victor Henry was bayonetted to death. So it was a very awful end for them. Amazingly, Kristoff's daughters and wife made it out of the kingdom and traveled to England where they were then looked after by Thomas Clarkson in Cambridgeshire. And eventually they then traveled on to Italy in exile. And I'd like to draw attention to the amazing work of Nicole Wilson who's been working on the stories of women in the revolution and has done lots of work on Marie-Louise Kristoff's wife and her onward journey to England. So it's a really amazing, amazing story. There aren't descendants still out there, are there? Sort of. It's a good question. That would be one for Nicole and all of the wonderful historians of this period, the Haitian historians. We've got a question posted, Anonasi, which is a prayer, but thank you so much, activation mark again. Is there any information relating to the reception of the portraits in Russia? Ah, that I have not researched at all. If anyone knows anything about that, it would be great to talk to you about it. I don't know is the question. I don't really know about the story of the Russian version in the same way. I mean, these portraits, the two that we've been looking at tonight that were gifted to Wilberforce, they stayed in Wilberforce's family right into the 20th century when they were then sold to Nemours who was a Haitian diplomat. And that's how they ended up in Puerto Rico as part of a collection of Haitian history that Nemours assembled. But no, I don't know about the provenance of the Russian one. I'm really sorry, I'd really like to learn more. So the pictures were in the UK for a long time? Were they exhibited? Yeah, great question. What do you mean? Were they exhibited? Oh, gosh, that's a really interesting question. I'm not sure. Again, I'll have to look into that. But I think, I know that. And again, Aura Diaz in Puerto Rico has looked into this. I think they were illustrated in the London Illustrated, the Illustrated London News at some point. That must have been in the 20th century, I think. But what exactly they were doing going back to the conversation we had a couple of weeks ago in terms of, you know, where portraits hang out after they're kind of flurry on the Academy's walls. I don't actually know. Yeah, and Richard Evans is not, you know, not a big name in British art history. Probably aside from these pictures, really. Not at all. But, you know, then again, I think these pictures, yeah, it's an interesting kind of another sort of reversal in a way, because the pictures themselves are, you know, I think they deserve to be kind of understood and looked at as an absolutely major moment in the history of British art. Great. We've got a question here from your colleague, Dorothy Price. I really enjoyed this, Esther. Thank you. I wonder whether you can say more about the point you raised about Turner's ambivalence towards the loss of conventions for academic history painting. It seemed a key point in relation to your reading of Evans's portrait, but I wondered whether you had any more thoughts on this. This is something that I would like to develop a bit more and I need to kind of get my thinking cap on about a bit more. I mean, this is sort of an established argument about Turner's field of waterloo. And I mentioned the work of Costello. And I suppose, you know, the next work to kind of bring in here maybe might be something like Turner's slave ship image, which is equally a kind of a landscape, historical portrait painting of kind of historical trauma. It has raised that question for me, but I really need to think more and think more about Turner. I mean, Martin, you know more about the field of waterloo than I do, having looked after it for many, many years. I kept my distance from Turner, don't worry. I suppose the Turner is a big, sort of pretty grisly, gruesome painting, which is a kind of landscape format and a battle painting, but big and imposing. Whereas the Evans portraits are grand-style portraits with all the pomp and the circumstance and the grandeur, but on a very small scale. So there's an interesting sort of inversion, almost of landscape being inflated and grand-style portrait are being reduced, at least in terms of kind of physical size. No wonder that's... Yeah, I mean, I guess, yeah, maybe kind of more general point to make about this kind of crisis of the genres, if you want to call it that, that this ensemble together kind of represents, although they're doing it in different, they're kind of responding to this shifting of priorities in terms of the genres of representation. This is a moment where landscape is coming to dominate and landscape is taking on, in some ways, the function of history. And we're seeing similar kinds of disturbances in the field of portraiture, but it's playing out in these particular instances in kind of different ways. So it's, I mean, again, I think it's having the juxtaposition of the two is provoking a lot of questions that are certainly not, I haven't got the answers to, but raising the questions, I think that we need to be asking. Okay, let's move on to a point from Selina Calder, who asks, are there any other portraits of the King and Prince by British artists or are evences the only ones? Really interesting question. So thank you for that. So I mentioned the images of Kristoff in this earlier English publication by Marcus Rainsford. And then there's that Italian print, but in terms of paintings by other British artists, I am not sure. In the essay that I suggested as part of the kind of supplementary reading that some of you might have looked at by Tabitha McIntosh and Gregory Piero, which is really worth reading, they talk about how, and again, this is something that you see happening a lot in the history of Haiti from this period is that a work of art or an object might be described in say a newspaper article, but it doesn't actually survive physically. There was a description in newspapers, I think around 1820 or so after, I think after Kristoff had died, describing a painting that came over with a British sailor of Kristoff and his family. But again, that painting itself has disappeared from view. Amazing. Well, if anybody's got it in their attic. Yeah, I know. I was thinking that this would be the most amazing find of the century. Yeah. I mean, what's what's striking? And I think this is a question for you, actually, about Kristoff's kind of shopping habits as it were in terms of cultural shopping and who he was looking to for representation, because the evidences are very, I think I'd be right and say, I mean, they disagree with me, but they're very British looking paintings, right? I mean, this is what Reynolds and Lawrence, there's a kind of tradition of British painting, which is emulated, but I don't think you'd mistake these necessarily for French paintings or German painters at the same moment, right? These are very British looking paintings. So was he looking to other European artists? I mean, you talk about how he's inserting himself in a European tradition or claiming a kind of authority from European visual traditions. But is it European or is it British specifically? Are there other traditions that he's also claiming and working with? I think in terms of the portraiture and the kind of other pertinence of his court, it is very explicitly British in this period, because remember that all this while France is still a threat, France is still a potential reinvasion threat. What Kristoff wants to do is to align himself with the British and show to the British, this is a very conscious strategy, and this is the subject of the Macintosh and Pierrot essay that I keep mentioning. He wants to show the British that he shares their values, that he can be understood by them, and that will get the British on side and that, you know, that he will continue to be a viable trading partner with Britain. And this is vital to his struggle against the French essentially. So it's very consciously British aesthetics that he's adopting. Having said that, elements of his court, for example, that wonderful book of heraldry that we saw, which I recommend everyone to take a look at. I've actually got the book in front of me here. It's been reproduced beautifully in this publication by the College of Arms. Elements of the heraldry and the structure of the nobility and so on were actually adopted from French precedent. So as so often in the Caribbean, there is such amazing blending and such amazing kind of layering of many, many different cultural references. So do you think there was an appetite and desire to align with a kind of British image of royalty or British images of authority because of at least the claims that were being made about kind of the liberal and constitutional nature of Britain as opposed to other European nations? When all that, you have to say that and remember that in the 1790s, Britain was spending sending out huge forces to try and quell revolution in the Caribbean, right? So we weren't on the right side of history, let's say. But do you think there's that in terms of an image of monarchy or an image of authority that British portrait offered something particular? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I mean, again, I think it goes back to the last question, to the last answer that I gave about this need to align Christoph in the eyes of the British with British values and I guess the structure of constitutional monarchy was part of that. Although Christoph ruled under a constitution that he wrote, he was criticised later in his regime for increasing authoritarianism. But again, I think that he was very selective about what kind of image he wanted to convey to his audience in Britain. And remember that not only are these pictures being shown at the Royal Academy, for example, stories about Christoph are again, McKintosh and Pierre have written about this extensively. Stories are circulating anecdotes throughout the press about him. This is someone who is very much in the news. So I think that these pictures have fallen from view for us quite a bit. I mean, I had never, having studied British art all my life, I had never seen them until all my life, since I was 18. I'd never seen them until five years ago. They've dropped from our view, but I think actually for viewers in 1818 in London, they knew exactly who these figures were. These stories and these events had been in the news constantly since the beginning of the revolution. But this takes us back to a point that was made earlier on by Janet Kulott in the chat asking about Richard Evans. Whether we know about Richard Evans' politics, would he have viewed himself as an abolitionist? That's a really interesting question. Yeah, I actually haven't given that lots of thought. I alluded to this idea of opportunism, that if you're an artist like Evans, who's not doing spectacularly well in his career, perhaps this would represent a really lucrative opportunity. So it's a kind of opportunistic move, just like it was going to be for Charles Rossi, the sculptor who I don't think ended up going. So I hesitate to say that Evans went because of his personal allegiances to Christoph's kingdom and to Christoph's politics. What he took on board while he was there, what he brought back with him, and by the way, he was back in London by 1818. He's listed in the Academy catalogue as living at 86 Newman Street, which was the kind of artist street in this period. So he's back in London by 1818. What he took on board while he was in Haiti, what he learned from Christoph and the court, and what views he held about Christoph, I don't know. I mean, only the portraits in some ways can testify to the fact that he executed the likenesses of these figures with great care, and really kind of rose to the occasion, frankly. There's quite a lot of commentary in the chat about these lectures and making art history accessible and the quality of the talk, and the quality of the series as well, which is great to hear. There's a comment here from Fameda Ferdas, I'm sorry, Ferdas. Sorry if I've not got your name potentially finishing quite right, but thank you Esther for an excellent talk. I am British Bengali. I wanted to know more about how we can help inspire brown people in Britain to get more inspired in art history, as this seems to be such underrepresentation, something about audience and engagement. But also, from your research, did you find any portraits of Indian women in prominent positions in 18th century British art? I guess, are there portraits, comparable portraits of Indian women, or...? That's such a wonderful question. Thank you very much for that. I mean, just to answer part of your question, I think the answer to making these histories more accessible is to keep highlighting that, you know, black history has always been part of the history of British art, as these works show, and we have a duty to bring those stories to the fore. So that's what I hope some of this work does. There are absolutely representations of Indian women in British art. Often, those women are shown in roles of subservience and servitude, as you might expect, just like some of the kind of racialized Grand Manna portraits that we looked at today. But there are occasionally really fantastic autonomous representations. It's a wonderful work that has just been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum, by an artist called William Wood. Of a woman called Joanna De Silva, and it shows her completely as the full subject of the canvas, very kind of honorific and ennobling representation of her. And so I can definitely point you to that. And indeed, you know, do get in touch afterwards, because there's lots and lots of research going on in British art studies, on British India in particular, on India more generally. So, you know, that work is happening. But you were saying that the Richard Evans portraits you didn't know about, you know, even as a specialist working in the 18th century and working in British portraiture and painting. I mean, they were sort of discoveries. I mean, it's your sense that that is going to be a matter of unearthing images and bringing them to the fore. It's not that they're all known already, that there's perhaps things which are to be kind of... Well, I think that we have to have that attitude in a way. I mean, I think that it would be folly to think that there's a kind of masterpiece hiding around every corner that we don't yet know about. But I think that the whole point of what we do is to keep working to bring new material to light. I mean, and to bring new things about old works, works that we thought that we knew to light. So going back to that amazing portrait of Charles Stanhope with Marcus Thomas, the servant of Charles Stanhope, it's not that that figure was irreverently anonymous. His name was known, we just lost it, and we have to insist on finding it again. And that's what that new archival work has done, which is really wonderful. Great. Well, I think 25, 7. You kept us enthralled for the formal part of the evening with your wonderful talk. You've continued to keep us enthralled in responding to these various questions. I know there are one or two other things lined up, but we've had a fantastic evening with you. So thank you so much, Esther. I'm sure that will be echoed around this virtual room. And yeah, and we look forward to more of your work being published and sent there into the world as I kind of introduced for introducing you this evening. I mean, you've really been at the forefront of globalizing British art history and making us all kind of think afresh about the existing art history, but also the kind of new horizons and new things to think about in the global context and the global understandings of British art in the 18th and 19th century. So a wonderful contribution to this series. The series continues on 17th November with Nicholas Robbins, George Romney, in the prison world of Europe. So I hope, and that I think we'll be planning to be in Bedford Square and online. So I hope you'll be able to join us for that and for further talks in this series. But for now, join me in saying thank you so much, Esther. And everybody have a good evening. Thanks so much, Martin. Thanks, everyone.