Weston, 2011, 152–163). Black subjects were consigned, like many female figures, to decorative or
erotic roles designed to meet the gaze of the “curious.”
Slave trading was, for much of the eighteenth century, regarded as a gentlemanly pursuit, plantation
owners in the Caribbean and other places often commissioning portraits of themselves with their black
servants as a means of complying with conventions of gentility (Ford, Cummins, McCrea and Weston,
2011, 259). Landscape views of plantations, frequently made by artists such as Thomas Hearne for their
absentee colonial owners, captured locations such as the thriving sugar plantations of Jamaica and the
Leeward Islands. Sugar plantations were at their peak from the 1730s to the early nineteenth century and
were often overseen on behalf of absentee English owners by Irish or Scottish estate managers. While
these images exploited the exoticism and actual appearances of the locales represented, they also used a
European picturesque aesthetic to defuse the horrors and tensions of actual slavery and make it appear
“natural.” Geoff Quilley has deconstructed the representations of Jamaican landscapes commissioned by
William Thomas Beckford (1760–1844), a British art collector from a family with colonial interests in
the country, as uneasy hybrids of the exotic and the classically beautiful: they served as evasions,
“displacements” or “surrogations” of the actual spaces of empire and the harsh conditions of slavery,
thereby expressing indirectly the complex, colonial identity of Beckford himself (Quilley, 2003, 106–
124). Plantation views also show the replication abroad of British Georgian mansions as second homes
for their owners (Barringer, Quilley and Fordham, 2007, 12–13; Crowley, 2011, 111–128; Leech, 2013,
54–58). Many such images were exhibited at the Incorporated Society of Artists and at the Royal
Academy.
Images representing the lives of slaves mostly glossed over the traumas and horrors they faced, which
tended to feature more largely in literature and politics. Most Enlightenment thinkers, informed by
reformist ideas on politics, economics and religion, abhorred the practice of slavery. The Spirit of the
Laws (1748) by CharlesLouis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), and the
History of the Two Indies (1770) by GuillaumeThomasFrançois Raynal (1713–1796), Diderot and
others, were among those texts that spoke for universal freedom and equality. Adam Smith argued on
economic grounds against the institution, as he felt that free men were able to work more productively: he
was also a defender of “liberty” in the broader sense. But proslavery arguments remained influential for
much of the century. Edward Long (1734–1813), champion of the West Indian slave owners, justified
slavery on grounds of racial difference, regarding the “White” and the “Negroe” as two different species
(Bindman and Gates, 2011, xx). France tried to limit, from the 1770s, the number of blacks coming to the
country, as fears grew of interracial breeding and the depletion of plantation staff. This was perhaps a
response, also, to the growing numbers of blacks employed in Paris, Marseilles, Nantes and Bordeaux. In
1802 Napoleon reversed the country’s 1791 decree to grant liberty to all persons of color and its 1794
decision to abolish slavery.
There were very few images explicitly condemning the slave trade and most of these focused on the
terrible conditions of the “middle passage” or sea crossing between Africa and the Caribbean. A print
entitled “Description of a Slave Ship” issued in 1789 by the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade,
proved to be instrumental in constructing modern abolitionist sympathies. This print represented in
graphic, diagrammatic fashion the cramped, inhuman conditions in which slaves were kept (Wood, 2000,
19). George Morland was relatively rare in his pictorial exposure of some of the cruelties of slavery,
contrasting African hospitality to western visitors with slave traders’ breaking up of the families of
kidnapped slaves in his Execrable Human Traffic (1788) (Figure 3.9) (Bindman and Weston, 2011, 166–
170). Hogarth’s prints were also exceptional in representing black servantslaves as the victims, along
with poorer white subjects, of a callously commercial society in which they threw into relief the
corruption, artificiality and pretentiousness of a contemporary white elite (Dabydeen, 1985, 11, 36–37,