Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century , 2014

The nineteenth century was an important era in reference to the representation of blacks and blac...

more

The nineteenth century was an important era in reference to the representation of blacks and blackness in western art and popular culture. Depictions of the “other” were strongly influenced by slavery, the anti-slavery movement, emancipation, and colonialism.

This chapter addresses how one early nineteenth century British artist approached the subject. It focuses on a painting by James Northcote the artist completed in 1826, entitled Head of a Negro in the Character of Othello. Northcote’s model was Ira Aldridge. It can be argued that the modern era in reference to the play Othello, began with the career of the first internationally known black actor, Ira Aldridge (1807-1867). The identifiable presence of Ira Aldridge as a black man in the role brought ‘race’ as we have come to understand it as socially constructed and burdened with complex and multiple meanings, to the foreground.

I am particularly interested in the relationship between European and American modes of representation. How did the novelty of a black actor in the role influence professional artists? In what ways did representation of an individual of African descent who began to achieve a certain level of fame affect the approach to the depiction of non-Europeans in the fine arts? And how did the foreign, specifically American identity of Ira Aldridge, the racial “baggage’ associated with slavery, as well as the new multi-faceted and complex black American culture born out of the “peculiar institution”, influence European visual culture during the long nineteenth century?

This paper interprets Northcote’s early portrait of Aldridge in character as Othello as a complex document of racial and political anxieties that fits within a pivotal historical moment in the depiction of blacks in western art on both sides of the Atlantic.