Peter Lely
Portrait of Elizabeth Murray
England (c. 1650)
Oil on canvas, 124 x 119Â cm
I have seen pictures of this before, in a previous art history class, but I donât remember there being a second person before. I seem to remember this image being cropped differently too, the way I remember it being cropped was very clearly and deliberately intended to remove the person holding the tray of flowers.People of Color from Medieval, Renaissance, and other Early Modern European works were often literally painted over in later decades or centuries.
For example: In this painting, Giulia deâMedici (the child) was painted over in the 19th century:
It was very fashionable in a lot of 17th and 18th century paintings to have a Black servant featured in portraits of very important historical figures from European History.Theyâre practically ubiquitous. A lot of the very famous paintings we have seen of European and American historical figures have a Black servant in them that have been cropped out or painted over. Even those stock photos from our American History Professorâs Powerpoint.
jean Chardin:
Maria Henriette Stuart
However, because of the whitewashed of history , teachers and professors continue to use the cropped images because they donât want their lecture to get âderailedâ by a discussion about race.These images are also more commonly seen on stock photo sites, including ones for academic use.
Oil paintings of aristocratic families from this period make the point clearly. Artists routinely positioned black people on the edges or at the rear of their canvasses, from where they gaze wonderingly at their masters and mistresses. In order to reveal a âhierarchy of power relationshipsâ, they were often placed next to dogs and other domestic animals, with whom they shared, according to the art critic and novelist David Dabydeen, âmore or less the same statusâ. Their humanity effaced, they exist in these pictures as solitary mutes, aesthetic foils to their ownersâ economic fortunes. The reason they are so easy to crop out is because of the the artistic conventions which reflect the power hierarchy: