Art, Colonialism and Change

 Moving round this exceptional exhibition, I was struck by how much more powerfully a single work of art – rather than any number of words -- can express the pain and contradictions of history. Yet at the same time, offer a fresh perspective on the brutally contrasting and intimately entangled pasts of Africa, India, Britain and the Americas.

Of which we still know so little.

Bust of a Man by Francis Harwood, 1758,
John Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

You enter the RA’s central rotunda to be greeted by a handful of fine portraits of Black men. Strong, handsome, elegant – among them works by Gainsborough, Reynolds, and John Singleton Copley. Each is accorded all the care and dignity, of any of their white sitters of their time. In the centre stands a black stone bust of a man from 1758 by Francis Harwood. Wonderfully lit, it is reflected up on a series of mirrors to alternate with busts of famous white men beneath the dome. The normal order of the white world has been subverted.

This is a show that makes its points with a light touch. Huw Locke’s Armada imagines the flotillas of craft engaged in the servicing of the plantation economy. At first these look magical. Mesmerising, tiny craft: fishing boats and lighters, miniature Spanish galleons. Look closer. High-rigged slaving ships, their sails, blackened and tattered, like the death ships they were. All are realised from abandoned lengths of string and cloth, plastic, wood and rubber and are suspended like flotsam and jetsam on uneven waves from the ceiling.

Hew Locke RA, Armada, 2017–19, Tate.
Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry. 

Benjamin West’s The Death of General James Wolfe – celebrated in my Canadian past as one of the nation’s great heroes – was painted twenty years after his death after defeating the French on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec in 1759. At his feet sits an idealised First Nation man. In fact he is a Delaware, rather than any of the native tribes to be found in the locale.