Classical Art and Atlantic Slavery

Gavin Hamilton’s James Dawkins and Robert Wood Discovering the Ruins of Palmyra (1758), today in Edinburgh, is a good place to start thinking about the relationship between classical art and Atlantic slavery.

The painting depicts James Dawkins II and Robert Wood, the two men dressed in togas, as they round a corner towards Palmyra's Monumental Arch. James Dawkins funded both the expedition here commemorated, and Wood's Palmyra (1753), the resulting "elephant folio" that initiated widespread distribution and imitation of images of classical architecture in Europe.

Dawkins also hosted James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, whom he and Wood had met on their travels, in his London house while they prepared their Antiquities of Athens (1762).

When James Dawkins died in 1757, his brother Henry commissioned this canvas from the Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton, himself a major excavator of and dealer in classical sculpture.

Where did the Dawkins brothers get their money? They held joint title to some 25,000 acres of sugar plantation in Jamaica, and a commensurate number of slaves. In 1835 and 1836, following Emancipation, the trustees of Henry's son, James Colyear Dawkins, claimed "compensation" for 724 enslaved people, receiving an award from Parliament of over thirteen thousand pounds (well over a million pounds in today's terms).

Therefore, the production and dissemination of an enduring idea of "classical art" was funded by a brutal regime of race-based slavery in the British West Indies. Should this make us reconsider the figure tending the horse at the right of Hamilton's painting?

As for the animal, one thinks first of Dr. Johnson’s aperçu: "The only great instance that I have ever known of the enjoyment of wealth was that of Jamaica Dawkins, who going to visit Palmyra, and hearing that the way was infested with robbers, hired a troop of Turkish horse to guard him."

As for the man, his dress codes him as Ottoman, his physiognomy and skin color as African. Of all the figures in the painting he stands furthest in the foreground and wears the brightest blues and reds; and yet he has occasioned barely any comment in the literature on the painting.

Why can African labor appear plainly in a painting of the British invention of classical art, so long as the African is shown as an Ottoman subject? A related question arises from The Greek Slave (1843) by Hiram Powers.

She is doubly Greek. Greek as a Greek statue, but also Greek as an Ottoman subject. Writes the sculptor:

"The Slave has been taken from one of the Greek Islands by the Turks, in the time of the Greek Revolution; the history of which is familiar to all. Her father and mother, and perhaps all her kindred, have been destroyed by her foes, and she alone preserved as a treasure too valuable to be thrown away. She is now among barbarian strangers, under the pressure of a full recollection of the calamitous events which have brought her to her present state; and she stands exposed to the gaze of the people she abhors, and awaits her fate with intense anxiety, tempered indeed by the support of her reliance upon the goodness of God. Gather all these afflictions together, and add to them the fortitude and resignation of a Christian, and no room will be left for shame."

Here she is exposed to the gaze of respectable people and without shame:

After British Emancipation, but while Americans still owned slaves, slavery can appear as barbarous to public view, so long as the slave is both classical and Christian, and the tyrant is a Turk.

So Atlantic slavery is not absent from classical art; rather, it is unavoidably present, but refracted through the Orient.

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Hamilton’s Dawkins and Wood is a bit embarassing. It is a bit over the top.

That willowy palm is a bit too distressed, that mustachioed Turk a bit too sinister, the black man a bit too black.

Who is he in this picture? How did he end up here?

Is he a caricature, like the leftmost figure in Hogarth’s Taste in High Life (1746); this latter, “an enslaved servant who wears an exoticizing feather turban, pearl earring, and metal collar”?

Dawkins and Wood were not wearing togas when they reached the ruins at Palmyra, but there were probably Turks on horses; perhaps also an African man?

BENJAMIN ANDERSONHISTORY OF ART

BENJAMIN ANDERSON
HISTORY OF ART