Cummins, McCrea and Weston, 2011, 288–297). In this respect, however, there was little or no advance
on the situation in the Renaissance and seventeenth century, when artists such as Veronese, Rubens and
Titian used black figures principally to create dramatic, exotic effects. Empire and slavery generally
failed to provide the frameworks of equality necessary to establish models of autonomous, black agency
of the kind we currently assume to be part of “modernity.”
Eighteenthcentury European representations of American Indians were, like those of other peoples,
deeply inflected by “allegorical symbolism, voyages of discovery, imperial or colonial expansion and
trade” and by discourses of imperialism (significant in the Americas from the sixteenth century) involving
“power, fear and fantasy” (Pratt, 1998, 135). The stereotype of the “noble savage” was applied with most
enthusiasm and frequency to American Indians, conceived by Locke as surviving testimony of the human
race’s earliest (and therefore least corrupt) stage of development (Wood, 2012, 279). The Essay on Man
(1734) by Alexander Pope (1688–1744) reinforced this view:
“Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor’d mind /
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind; / His soul proud Science never taught to stray / Far as
the solar walk or milky way; / Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv’n, / Behind the cloudtopp’d hill,
a humbler heav’n; / Some safer world in depth of woods embrac’d, / Some happier island in the
wat’ry waste, / Where slaves once more their native land behold, / No fiends torment, no Christians
thirst for gold! / To be, contents his natural desire; / He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire: / But
thinks, admitted to that equal sky, /
His faithful dog shall bear him company.
(Epistle I ll. 91–112, in Pope, 1950 [1734], 27–28)The native peoples of presentday Canada, North and South America were conceived ideologically
within liberal culture as “innocent” and “natural” foils to the excesses and pretentiousness of
contemporary European civilization (Bindman, 2002, 11–16, 29–78). They also served as exotic motifs in
tapestry designs (Scott, 1995, 34–36). To many colonial publics, however, they were associated with
superstition and savagery and the “need” for western supervision. Joseph Wilton’s Monument to General
James Wolfe (erected in Westminster Abbey in 1772), the British hero of the Québec campaign, contrasts
the general’s barebreasted vulnerability and nobly classical nude body with the hatchets and scalping
implements representing the brutality of American Indians (Fordham, 2007, 102–119). This was one of
several monuments that established Britain’s colonial adventures and identity, in a conventional visual
language used to highlight political rupture. In Hogarth’s The Gaols Committee of the House of Commons
(c.1729), a painting representing an investigation into the Fleet Prison, a kneeling prisoner appears as a
submissive American Indian dependent on the clemency of western authority.
The American artist Benjamin West created fashionable history paintings for an imperial British public
that included American Indians. West was actually descended from farmers, soldiers and craftsmen, his
own father being a tavern owner, yet he cultivated in Britain, in response to the “noble savage” myth, the
persona of a simple backwoodsman, skillfully combining this with the sophistication required of a
member (and eventually leader) of the Royal Academy (Abrams, 1985, 35–39; Fenton, 2006, 151–163).
Paintings such as West’s Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (1771–1772) omitted overt references to
violence in order to represent western interactions with American Indians as benign affairs. West’s
“Indians” often played on the conventional association of the noble savage, with the classical hero,
ancient Greek and Roman statuary warrior poses supplying a suitable pictorial idiom.
Reynolds was among those artists who sought to reconcile images of American Indians with more