Third Text

31 July 2024

C Oliver O’Donnell

‘Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change’, Royal Academy, London, 3 February – 28 April 2024

Tavares Strachen, The First Supper, 2023, bronze, black patina and gold leaf, in ‘Entangled Pasts, 1768–Now: Art, Colonialism and Change’, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 3 February – 24 April 2024, photo by Jonty Wilde, courtesy of Tavares Strachan and Perrotin
 

In a recent article in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Tanya Sheehan asked ‘What stories could we be foreclosing by seeing American art history exclusively through the lens of slavery and its legacies’? ^[1]  Sheehan’s question was on my mind when I visited the exhibition ‘Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change’ at London’s Royal Academy of Arts earlier in 2024. As a whole, the exhibition adopted the now common strategy of juxtaposing British and American paintings and sculptures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with contemporary art, including sculptural works by prominent Black artists such as Yinka Shonibare and El Anatsui, as well as a magnificent video installation by John Akomfrah. ^[2]  The result was a powerful, emotionally charged and much needed staging ground for confronting the legacies of British colonialism and slavery as they are widely perceived to bear on the present.

‘Entangled Pasts, 1768–Now: Art, Colonialism and Change’, installation view, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 3 February – 24 April 2024, photo courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts

Upon entering this important exhibition, viewers found themselves in an octagonal rotunda, mostly populated with eighteenth-century portraits by white artists of largely unidentified Black sitters. Above, spotlit busts of Old Masters like Michelangelo and Titian looked down upon the spectators. By blocking a number of these portrait busts with mirrors angled downwards, the curators prompted visitors to see their own reflections in the position of artists the Royal Academy has long lionised. In the ensuing galleries, historical and contemporary works were repeatedly brought into conversation, sometimes in intentionally time-bending ways. Hew Locke’s Armada (2017–2019), composed of a small fleet of model boats representing contemporary and colonial contexts, dominated the second gallery, the walls of which were largely hung with classic eighteenth-century paintings. A few galleries later, visitors were confronted by Isaac Julien’s 26-minute film, Lessons of the Hour (2019), projected on a large scale and in high definition and which largely consists of the artist re-enacting passionate speeches by Frederick Douglass in period dress. Within a red-velvet-draped room, this film was contrasted with nineteenth-century sculptures like Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave, a statue long associated with the abolitionist movement, along with daguerreotype-style photographs of Julien himself. By the time visitors found themselves enveloped by Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004), that populated some of the final galleries and which consists of one hundred life-size and brightly painted, two-dimensional Black figures made of plywood and standing on the floor, history was being seen exclusively through contemporary art. Here visitors were literally forced to face their place in the larger story the exhibition explored. The result brought the past and present, the artworks and the viewers into dialogue in quite literal, confrontational and provocative ways.

‘Entangled Pasts, 1768–Now: Art, Colonialism and Change’, installation view with Hew Locke’s Armada (2017–2019), Royal Academy of Arts, London, 3 February – 24 April 2024, photo by the author
 

Lubaina Himid, Naming the Money, 2004, plywood, acrylic and mixed media, installation view in ‘Entangled Pasts, 1768–Now: Art, Colonialism and Change’, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 3 February – 24 April 2024, photo by David Parry, courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts

The overall issue of historical entanglement is very much of our time, especially following the Black Lives Matter movement, which, as the catalogue notes, combined with the watershed moment that was the COVID-19 pandemic to dramatically expose enduring and shameful inequalities, often along racial lines, across much of the world, and inspired widespread protests with the goal of rectifying these disparities. ^[3]  The pursuit of social justice that resulted is admirable. Within this context, however, the fact should not be lost sight of that the same desire which motivates our understanding of the past can also work to obscure it. Although the exhibition surely succeeded in its overall goals, serious sympathetic reflection on the historical entanglements it might have missed, or the stories it might have foreclosed, to recall Sheehan’s words, should also be part of the conversations it inspires. Such reflection, which I offer here, would further advance any understanding of the historical entanglements the exhibition rightly highlighted. However, it would also mean asking what we really want from our past. Any interpretive lens will inevitably bring some historical themes into clearer view than others. Yet by uncovering entangled histories in light of present motivations, are we looking to reveal the past as clearly as possible, or do we accept exaggerations, omissions or useful fictions that serve present-day purposes? When the past is framed forcefully through the present, sometimes too much can be seen and at other times too little. In what follows, I attempt to demonstrate these two poles of interpretative risk by discussing the curators’ descriptions of two specific works included in the displays. My points may at times seem overly detailed, but what they attempt to demonstrate is the extraordinary power of this exhibition.

John Singleton Copley, Mary and Elizabeth Royall, c1758, oil on canvas, photo courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

John Singleton Copley’s portrait, Mary and Elizabeth Royall, painted in about 1758, stood out in the exhibition for how directly it was positioned in relation to the entanglements of the past. Recent research into the Royall family has exposed their significant role in the enslavement of Africans in the Americas, including at the family’s plantation in Antigua and their residence outside Boston, where they held almost forty men, women and children in bondage. Copley himself enslaved three people: Lucy, Cato and Snap. The exhibition’s wall labels and catalogue prominently discuss these facts, which have not been sufficiently considered in the scholarship. Understandably seeking to make this dark side of Copley’s portraiture visible, the curators pointed to the hummingbird perched on the elder Royall sister’s right hand and asserted that it was ‘native Antiguan’. This made the bird a veiled reference to the trade in enslaved Africans that underwrote both the money on display in the portrait – long associated with Copley’s luxuriously painted fabrics – as well as the cost of the portrait itself. Remarkably, by way of this association, the exhibition completely reversed a prominent existing interpretation not only of this portrait but also of the specific bird depicted within it. For one Copley scholar, who positioned the bird in relation to John Locke’s theory of education as it could plausibly have been understood by the Royalls and Copley, the bird was a symbol not of moral failure but of moral accomplishment, a demonstration of the Royall daughter’s disciplined ability to train the wild animal by controlling its experience. ^[4]

John Singleton Copley, detail of hummingbird in Mary and Elizabeth Royall, c1758, oil on canvas, photo by the author

What can be made of this astonishing opposition? Could both interpretations be partially true? Can history or even ornithology help adjudicate what this bird really means? While the association of the bird with the West Indies undoubtedly supplies a highly suggestive reading of the artwork, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the hummingbird represented in the painting would not have been ‘from’ Antigua. In 1995, the depicted bird in question was identified as a ruby-throated hummingbird. ^[5]  Thanks in large measure to the extreme amount of detail found across Copley’s paintings, this identification seems secure and a comparison of the bird in the painting to historical images of the species shows why. As migratory animals, ruby-throated hummingbirds travel great distances every year in pursuit of food, with individual birds travelling hundreds and even thousands of miles between where they are born and breed in North America and where they end up feeding in Central America, often stopping over in western Caribbean islands such as Cuba along the way, although the ornithological consensus is that they stay well west of Antigua. ^[6]

^{Alexander Wilson, detail of female ruby-throated hummingbird in American Ornithology, vol II, 1810, image in the public domain}

These details matter because it is likely that at least some of them would have been known by Copley and the Royalls, inflecting what hummingbirds meant to them. Already in 1639, William Wood had described the ‘humbird’ as a ‘wonder of the country, being no bigger than a hornet, yet hath all the dimensions of a bird’ in his book about colonial Massachusetts. ^[7]  Mark Catesby included a full-page print and description of the species in his pioneering Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands of 1729–47. ^[8]  By 1810, the pioneering American ornithologist Alexander Wilson had noted that the ruby-throated hummingbird ventured easily into Canada and ‘is abundantly more numerous in America than the Wren is in Europe’. ^[9]  Wilson’s American Ornithology, which was based on decades of previous research, even drew on an account of an artist who was among Copley’s peers. According to Wilson, ‘Mr. Charles Willson Peale, proprietor of the Museum, tells me that he had two young Humming-birds which he raised from the nest. They used to fly about the room; and would frequently perch on Mrs Peale’s shoulder to be fed.’ ^[10]  The fact that Copley’s bird also perches on a woman, Mary Royall, reinforces this period familiarity with hummingbirds that would have been especially so among artists at the time. How might this historical and ornithological information bear on the painting?

Although ruby-throated hummingbirds were surely present in Copley’s Massachusetts, the artist did include exotic birds in other portraits that he made in Boston, and scholarly identifications of the hummingbird in the Royall sisters’ portrait as West Indian are hardly unprecedented. The existing literature on this painting has, for some time, traded in the possibility that this specific hummingbird is ‘from’ the Caribbean. Interestingly, the link to the West Indies was influentially made by the same scholar who identified the bird’s species and who interpreted it in relation to Lockean education, although he offered no more than the suggestion that ‘the hummingbird… may have been imported from the West Indies.’ ^[11]  Even as more recent literature has dispensed with some of this caution, a certain amount of doubt about the bird is usually maintained, qualifying its geographic origin by claiming, for instance, that it ‘may subtly allude to the Royall’s Caribbean roots’. ^[12]  However, in the wall label for Copley’s portrait in ‘Entangled Pasts’, qualifications were absent. There the text read in full:

Copley’s parents owned a tobacco shop on Long Wharf, Boston, Massachusetts, one of the busiest ports of the Atlantic world. Starting with commissions from merchants, Copley soon established himself as the leading portrait painter to Boston’s elite. This portrait shows the daughters of Isaac Royall Jr, who owned a sugar plantation in Antigua and enslaved people in colonial Massachusetts. The only clue to the source of the family’s wealth is the native Antiguan hummingbird resting on Mary’s hand.

Here, there is no doubt that the bird is from the very island where the Royall family profited from enslaved labour. As we have seen, however, where ruby-throated hummingbirds are ‘from’ is something of a gambit, in this case even a subtle art-historical anthropomorphisation that endows the animal with a specific geographic identity. The bird might even be said, in this description at least, to stand in for the enslaved Africans we cannot see, the descendants of whom, presumably, might still have active ties to Antigua. Little wonder, then, that reviews of the exhibition in the popular press picked up on this dramatic identification, some of them broadening the adjective to ‘West Indian’ while still being drawn to the supposed parallel between where the bird was ‘from’ and where the Royall family’s plantation was. ^[13]

The wall label could have been easily edited, of course. It is important not to overstate the exhibition’s overstatement, and not to make a mountain out of a molehill. The understandable desire to make the portrait speak directly to the history of colonialism and slavery – practices with which, it is most important to emphasise, both Copley and the Royalls were demonstrably entangled – led the curators to move ever so slightly away from what we actually know about this seemingly insignificant painted bird. Perhaps all historical interpretations end up massaging facts to tell a story, often unintentionally. Perhaps this is allowable as part of the freedom needed to make an interpretation that speaks powerfully to the present, a freedom also taken, for instance, when one curator largely improvises a quotation ‘by’ the Martiniquais intellectual Édouard Glissant in the catalogue. ^[14]  But should we really convince ourselves that there is a reference to Antigua in this portrait? Arguably, this would obscure the historically significant – and in a sense even more disturbing – likelihood that for Copley and the Royalls their entanglements with slavery deserved no recognition at all.

Another wall label in the exhibition caught my attention due to an account that saw too little rather than too much in the artwork it introduced. In their description of Johan Zoffany’s group portrait The Family of Sir William Young of 1767–69, which I also quote here in full, the curators understandably asserted:

Young was a British colonial governor, politician and owner of sugar plantations which, in 1788, included 896 enslaved Africans. This painting of Young’s family demonstrates the wealth – through the vast landscape and architecture of the family home – which resulted from the stolen labour and skills of enslaved people on his plantations in St Vincent, Tobago and Antigua. The Black attendant to the Young children has previously been named as John Brook, but his identity is currently disputed.

Johann Zoffany, The Family of Sir William Young, 1767–69, oil on canvas, photo by the author

By framing the opulence on display in this painting as the result of ‘the stolen labour and skills of enslaved people’, the description does more than justly expose an undeniable economic foundation of the Young family’s wealth; it also relies on the logic of what is often called the labour theory of property. In this view, property is the result of personal exertion, whether physical or mental, that transforms natural resources, which are often said to be common possessions. As a theory, it has deep and enduring appeal in European culture. John Locke famously defended it in his Second Treatise of Government of 1690, where he wrote:

Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men. ^[15]

Although not a common subject in art history, Locke’s theory and its correlates are highly relevant to an exhibition about colonialism, and especially so for one that is strongly critical of ‘extractive’ economies. The labour theory of property not only bears directly on the immorality of slavery but also on the dispossession of indigenous inhabitants of their land by British settlers around the world. Indeed, the same passage from Locke quoted above has frequently been debated by scholars of colonialism, because its theory of property implicitly prioritises agricultural labour over hunter-gatherer practice. Under this theory, to give an example, the establishment of a plantation on an island for the purpose of agriculture becomes the theoretical basis for making that island and its products settler possessions. ^[16]  Bringing this observation to bear on Zoffany’s portrait of the Young family, it becomes clear that the wealth depicted is not only based on the stolen labour of enslaved Africans, as the curators noted, but also on stolen land on the islands of St Vincent, Tobago and Antigua, which for centuries were – and to some extent still are – inhabited by groups like the Taíno.

Indigenous perspectives were in a small minority in ‘Entangled Pasts’, as they are in the London artworld more generally. Robert Houle’s set of prints, Lost Tribes (1990–1991), a riposte to Benjamin West’s canonical eighteenth-century painting, The Death of General Wolfe, from 1779, was the only example among over ninety artworks included in the displays. Yet Houle’s prints were not even hung in the same room as West’s canvas, a decision which considerably diminished the intended dialogue between them. The exhibition did not defend a settler-colonial theory of property, nor the possessive individualism that often follows from it. However, that its interpretation of Zoffany’s portrait of the Young family could not avoid such an entanglement, and all the more so in relation to the exhibition’s relative lack of attention to indigenous art, unintentionally dramatised how the labour theory of property contains within it both a justification for the abolition of slavery and a justification for indigenous dispossession. That same theory arguably still underwrites much of Western society, including the high prices fetched by the living artists in ‘Entangled Pasts’ as well as the institutional funding of the exhibition as a whole. This makes ‘Entangled Pasts’s own entanglement with a classic European understanding of property perhaps the most powerful demonstration of just how entangled the present and the past remain.
 

^[1]    Tanya Sheehan, ‘American Art Historiography, Slavery, and Its Aftermath’, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no 53, November 2023, pp 6–15, p 14

^[2]    This strategy is now commonly taken up in scholarly contexts; see Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2021; and Maggie Cao, Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2025

^[3]    See Dorothy Price, with Sarah Lea, ‘Entangled Pasts, 1768–Now: Art, Colonialism and Change’, in Entangled Pasts, 1768–Now: Art, Colonialism and Change, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy Publications, London, 2024, p 11

^[4]    See Paul Staiti, ‘Character and Class’, in John Singleton Copley in America, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1995, pp 53–78

^[5]    Ibid, p 63. The bird’s colouring would make it female, and Staiti kindly confirmed over email that the attribution, which occurred alongside an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was based on consultation with outside specialists. Based on my own non-specialist research, the only species of hummingbird that is found in Antigua and that does resemble the bird in Copley’s painting is the vervain hummingbird. However, the vervain hummingbird does not migrate and it does not resemble Copley’s hummingbird as much as the ruby-throated hummingbird does.

^[6]    See, for instance, Sheri L Williamson, Hummingbirds of North America, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2001, pp 191–193. Cornell University maintains an online and authoritative ornithological database; for its entry on the ruby-throated hummingbird, see www.allaboutbirds.org

^[7]    William Wood, New England’s Prospect, printed by John Dawson, London, 1639, p 32

^[8]    Mark Catesby, Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, London, 1729–47, pp 64–65

^[9]    Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology; or, the Natural history of the Birds of the United States, Philadelphia, 1810, p 27

^[10]   Ibid, p 50

^[11]   Staiti, ‘Character and Class’, op cit, p 184

^[12]   Nika Elder, ‘In the Flesh: John Singleton Copley’s Royall Portraits and Whiteness’, Art History, vol 44, no 5, November 2021, p 954; Elder’s article, cited in the Entangled Pasts catalogue by Esther Chadwick, states simply that Staiti ‘identified’ the bird (noting that ‘Several varieties of the bird inhabited Antigua and its surrounding islands, and they were popular among natural history collectors throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’)

^[13]   See Richard Drayton, ‘Clothing, power and portraiture’, RA Magazine, Winter 2023; and Laura Cumming, ‘Entangled Pasts: Art, Colonialism and Change review – the Most Radical Show in the RA’s History’, The Guardian, 4 February 2024

^[14]   See Cora Gilroy-Ware, ‘Repairing the Sable Venus’, in Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change, London, 2024, p 29, where she claims, citing Glissant’s concept of ‘opacity’, that ‘works of art by oppressed people are entitled to evade “possession and conquest” by upholders of “Western … metropolises of knowledge”’. Citing the 1997 English translation of Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, published by the University of Michigan Press, Gilroy-Ware references page 111 for her quotes. However, this page does not contain the phrase ‘possession and conquest’; and the word ‘Western’ there modifies ‘humanity’, not, as she suggests, ‘metropolises of knowledge’.

^[15]   John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 2003, V, §27

^[16]   A pioneering and classic discussion of this issue remains James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993

C Oliver O’Donnell is a historian on modern art and intellectual history with a particular focus on US-American traditions of modernity. His essays have appeared in journals such as Art Bulletin, Word & Image and Tate Papers, and his first monograph, Meyer Schapiro’s Critical Debates (Penn State University Press, 2019) won the Willibald Sauerländer Award from the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. He currently serves as a Research Notes Editor of Panorama: the Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.