Summary

Painted lead, sundial borne by a life-size, kneeling figure of an African man, attributed to Andries Carpentière (Andrew Carpenter; c. 1677 – London 1737) after the model by John Nost I (Mechelen c. 1660 - London 1711-13), c. 1735. A cast lead figure of a young African man in a half-kneeling position, the proper right knee and shin on the plinth, the proper left knee raised, supported by tucked left toes. The hands held aloft to support a stone disc and bronze sundial plate mounted on top of the head. The figure is nude, save for a feathered loin cloth painted blue and green. Polychromed according to the contemporary practice, and with blue eyes. After the so-called ‘blackamoor’ model by John Nost I, installed in 1701 in the Privy Garden of Hampton Court Palace. Mounted on a moulded stone plinth.

Full description

This life-size figure of a kneeling African man has stood prominently in front of the entrance to Dunham Massey for over three hundred years. It is attributed to Andries Carpentière (Andrew Carpenter), a sculptor and maker of lead statues who was commissioned by George Booth, 2nd Earl of Warrington (1675-1758), to produce monuments to the late 1st Earl, in 1735. The figure is believed to have been supplied by Carpentière around the same time. Within the lexicon of western art history, this sculpture has been categorised as a ‘blackamoor’, a personification of the continent of Africa, and an anonymous ‘kneeling slave’. These shifting, entangled designations reflect Britain’s own fraught relationship with the Black body and the legacies of its long and lucrative involvement in the colonial slave trade. In June 2020 the sculpture was temporarily removed from public view in response to the global anti-racism movement following the death of George Floyd (1973-2020). The National Trust is currently reassessing its display. The ‘blackamoor’ Cast after a model by John Nost I for William III’s Privy Garden at Hampton Court Palace, the original design for this figure derives from a European aesthetic tradition known as the ‘blackamoor’. A conflation of the Black African and Muslim ‘Moor’, the stereotyped and highly stylised figure of the ‘blackamoor’ took a variety of forms in ceramic and silverware, furniture and sculpture, architecture, painting and print (e.g. NT 413922, 452977, 118826, 802613, 1139940, 1140088). The ‘blackamoor’ typically wore exoticised and orientalised costume – here a feathered loincloth – and was often posed in service, literally functioning as a clock, tray or box holder, a torchère, or as a motif carved into the supportive elements of furniture. Here the kneeling man acts as a baluster or plinth, a load-bearing Atlas figure, his body braced beneath the weight of time, his expression unmistakably supplicant. The lead body is vividly painted according to the mid-Georgian fashion for ‘life-like’ garden statuary, the man given incongruously clear blue eyes to exoticise him further. The ‘blackamoor’ belongs to a range of objects marketed in the west to signify colonial prosperity. They were designed in European workshops for elite domestic settings and were displayed with other luxury goods purchased, imported, and collected from across the globe. This figure – and others like it – was of a type manufactured during British monopoly of the Transatlantic slave trade: a brutal and dehumanising economy that greatly enriched Britain, and contributed to its imperial expansion around the world. To the majority of Georgian Britons, the African body was an object of distanced fascination, entirely divorced from the miseries of slavery. The violence of that trade was inherent in the ornamental figure of the ‘blackamoor’, but at the same time ameliorated by it. In an extreme form of objectification, the enslaved African brought back to Britain to attend the wealthy was often dressed in exotic livery, and lived a limited life as a domestic servant, pageboy or coachman. As in art, the living ‘blackamoor’ was a piece of luxury property, passively conspicuous. This is no more acutely observed than in bust by John Nost I, carved for William III in around 1700 (RCIN 1396). It depicts an enslaved African man in a feathered turban, a jewelled livery collar, and a padlocked slave collar. Said to be a portrait of the king’s favourite servant, the sitter’s body is rendered from highly polished black limestone, his clothing and accoutrements from a variety of imported coloured marble. The kneeling African man at Dunham Massey occupies a prominent position directly in front of the front door, and is flanked at a distance by a pair of heraldic lions bearing the Booth family crest (NT 932335-8). A continuous and principal feature of the southern forecourt since 1735, the figure has survived eclipses in fashion, remodelling schemes, and, significantly, the Abolition. The Hampton Court model The most reproduced of all lead sculptures after John Nost I, this figure, and its derivations by Carpentière and John Cheere, originate from a well-documented model made for William III in 1701 (Eyres 2011, pp.25–95). As a former assistant to Nost, Carpentière, who set up independently in around 1714, would have had access to casts of the model, if not actual moulds. In the very same year that Britain entered the War of Spanish Succession (1701-14), Nost had been engaged by the Royal Works to produce a figure of ‘a Blackamore [sic] kneeling, 5 foot high, and holding a sundial’ (HCP accounts, 1701-2, National Archives, Works 5/52). The model was installed in October of that year, and joined in December by a pendant figure – a variation of the piece-moulded ‘blackamoor’ – ‘representing an Indian Slave Kneeling’, that also supported a sundial (Arley Hall cast reproduced Davis 1991, p. 49, pl. 1:14). The pendant suggests that the ‘kneeling blackamoor’ may have been intended as an allegory of the continent of Africa, the ‘Indian Slave’ personifying Asia. That the other known continents – Europe and America – were unrealised has been ascribed to the untimely death of the king in March 1702, a matter of months after ‘Africa’ and ‘Asia’ were installed. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that a continental set was ever planned (Davis 1991, pp. 48-9). Like the category ‘blackamoor’, the continental allegory was an entirely Eurocentric motif reflecting the politics and interests of the age. Europe was represented triumphantly, with symbols of intellectual and artistic wealth; Africa, Asia, and America depicted as its culturally impoverished subjects, though nevertheless rich in resources. Mounted opposite each other, and before the Palace itself, the king’s kneeling ‘blackamoor’ and ‘Indian’ symbolised powerful trade routes carrying cash crops, manufactured goods, and enslaved people from and between Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. In this context ‘Africa’ and ‘India’ seem an appropriate choice for the Dutch stadtholder and English king William III: the ‘blackamoor’ representative of England’s slave-trading ambitions, the ‘Indian slave’ of the Anglo-Dutch coalition that secured its monopoly in textile and spice trades, and that protected the East India Company’s control of the Madagascar slave trade. Emulating royal taste, subsequent casts of the ‘blackamoor’ and ‘Indian slave’ models were manufactured until at least 1750 for patrons such as Thomas Coke (Melbourne Hall), Elihu Yale (Plas Grono; YCBA, inv.no. 1922.8), Thomas Wentworth (Wentworth Castle), and many others (see Eyres 2011, pp. 15-25 for an inventory of extant casts). Coke and Wentworth’s ‘blackamoors’ can be read as symbols of political prowess, both erected in celebration of personal diplomatic achievements that gained Britain territories and trade rights. Wentworth’s cast in particular commemorated his negotiation of the Peace of Utrecht, a treaty that brought the Successional War to a close and awarded Britain the Asiento to trade enslaved Africans to Spanish America. An investor in the South Sea Company (SSC) – which ran the Asiento until its notorious collapse in 1720 – Wentworth also held shares in the East India Company and Mississippi Company. Similarly, the ‘blackamoor’ by Carpenter at Cannons signified fortunes made by the 1st Duke of Chandos in the Successional War, as well as his investments in the SSC, the Royal Africa, and Mississippi Companies. At least three further casts are known to have been installed in the gardens of Fetcham Park, Purley Hall, and Bush Hill, the homes of South Sea Company directors (Eyres 2011, pp. 72-6). A testament to the power of profit, Nost’s ‘blackamoor’ was the most popular and widely purchased of all lead statuary manufactured in the 18th century. Derivations of the model were continuously available until John Cheere died in 1787 and casts continue to circulate in the market today. Alice Rylance-Watson 2020