A new research project into the origins of the national collection has shone a light on the connections between artworks and the history of slavery
The National Gallery in London has revealed its collection’s connections to the history of slavery, via a new research project which has examined the links between artworks and those who profited from the slave trade.
The report, initiated in 2018 and titled ‘Legacies of British Slave-Ownership’, focuses on the period 1824-1880 and aims ‘to find out about what links to slave-ownership can be traced within the museum, and to what extent the profits from plantation slavery impacted our early history.’ It does note however that ‘inclusion on this list should not be understood to imply a direct connection with slavery’.
The research project – which first emerged when the gallery approached Nicholas Draper, the founder of UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery in order to form an academic partnership – began by looking into the philanthropist John Julius Angerstein, whose collection of paintings became a foundational part of the gallery on its founding in 1824.
The research project states that a proportion of Angerstein’s business activities ‘was in slave ships and vessels bringing to Britain produce cultivated in the Caribbean by enslaved people. Angerstein acted as a trustee of estates and enslaved people in Grenada and Antigua.’
Researchers also looked into artists’ and their artworks’ connections, including the nineteenth-century painter Thomas Gainsborough, whose works The Byam Family (1762–66) and The Baillie Family (ca. 1784) involved subjects who were slave-owners. The gallery will undertake further phases of the research project which will look into trustees and donors from 1880 to 1920, as well as past picture owners going back to 1640.
