Entangled Pasts 1768 - Now
Royal Academy of Arts, London

ENTANGLED PASTS 1768-Now tackles fundamental themes of human exploitation, cruelty and injustice inflicted on people of colour by British imperialism and its legacies from the 18th century to the present. It also focuses on black and Asian artists’ resistance to these injustices and celebrates their peoples’ achievements. 

Imperialist conquests are exemplified by single and group portraits commissioned by the wealthy and powerful who aggrandised their social status by having their ownership of “exotic” colonial servants included. Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of George, Prince of Wales, later King George IV, c 1787 depicts the prince in full regalia of elaborately embroidered coat of cream and blue with a red sash, standing in front of a classical column next to his extravagantly plumed hat. A young black male servant who also wears the British flag’s red, white and blue bends down to adjust the prince’s belt while the prince stares arrogantly into the middle distance, studiously ignoring the lad. 

Thomas Gainsborough’s half-length portrait of Ignatius Sancho is painted on a more modest scale yet it shows that the black composer, shopkeeper and writer was successful enough to have his portrait painted. But these are rare exceptions, and John Bell’s sculpture Manacled Slave of 1877 portraying a beautiful, but helpless young black enslaved woman is more typical of contemporary racial attitudes, while also embodying male sexual attitudes and fantasies of domination.