Portrait of a boy, published in 1853 as 'Me Warm Now'
George Baxter (Lewes 1804 - London 1867)
Category
Art / Prints
Date
9 Dec 1853
Materials
Paper
Measurements
320 x 270 mm
Order this imageCollection
Plas Yn Rhiw, Gwynedd
NT 647686.1
Summary
Framed colour print by George Baxter, depicting a young boy, turned towards the viewer, seated on a barrel in front of a fireplace. The boy is holding bellows on his knee. The title, ‘Me Warm Now’, is not visible.
Full description
The Keating sisters who donated Plas yn Rhiw to the Trust owned 6 Baxter prints, 5 in matched frames, including 3 of children – ‘Me Warm Now’, ‘The Morning Call’, and ‘So Nice’. The 5 in matched frames are displayed in the Library. George Baxter was a pioneering engraver and printer, who invented and patented a process of effective and relatively affordable colour printing. Through this process, he was able to make reproductions of paintings available on a mass scale. This print is similar to an earlier lithograph, produced by Thomas Fairland in the 1840s and published as Hunt’s Comic Sketches (1844). These Sketches were derived from a series of twenty paintings by watercolourist William Henry Hunt (1790 – 1864), which were originally exhibited at the Old Water-Colour Society in London in the 1830s. Hunt seems to have been involved in the production of the book. William Henry Hunt trained and worked in London. His work focussed on ‘scenes of human interest, including rural or domestic characters, as well as still lifes and figure studies’ [1]. He is known to have worked from live models, including for a number of skilled and sensitive watercolours of young black boys, some of which appear to show the same sitter. If Hunt painted the original watercolour from life in the 1830s, the boy who posed for him might very well have been born and brought up as a free person in Britain – and have spoken fluent English. But by the 1850s, the title of Baxter's print – ‘Me Warm Now’ – turns the central figure into a caricature; part of a process of othering in the Victorian cultural conception of the black child. George Baxter published this print on 9 December 1853, the year in which he had a stall at the Great Exhibition, New York. Its production came shortly after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852. ‘Me Warm Now’ was therefore perhaps produced for the Union (north American states) market, where cultural and artistic expressions of the campaign against slavery in the South were popular. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also hugely popular in Britain, selling 1.5 million copies in the British Empire between its publication and the end of 1853. ‘Me Warm Now’ is a commonly seen print in the UK today, which suggests that the print was marketed in Britain, potentially to capitalise on the massive market for Uncle Tom ‘tie-in merchandise’. [2] Beecher Stowe’s work was motivated by her desire to popularise the abolitionist movement in the States. But it also caricaturised African Americans and her depiction of Topsy, an enslaved girl, is seen as having played a critical role in the consolidation of the ‘pickaninny’ stereotype of the black child. The pidgin English which Topsy speaks is replicated in the title of Baxter’s print ‘Me Warm Now’. [1] ‘Hunt, William Henry (1790-1864)’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [2] David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016), p. 261
Provenance
The property was given to the Trust as part of the Plas yn Rhiw estate between 1950 and 1966 by the Misses Eileen, Lorna and Honora Keating in memory of their parents, John William and Constance Annie Keating.
Makers and roles
George Baxter (Lewes 1804 - London 1867), engraver and publisher