Enslaved Children in Brazil, 1822 watercolour for sale

SOTHEBYS NY 31 JANUARY 2024 LOT 251

Portrait of Maria, Emma, 'Cammondongo' and a doll seated at a table at Gloria Cottage, 1822 | Old Master and British Works on Paper | 2024 | Sotheby's (sothebys.com)

 Gloria Cottage group, Rio de Janeiro 1822, attributed to Maria Graham later Calcott

This very small drawing – about 3x4ins – appears to come from a sketchbook or block.  Showing a figure group in an interior space illuminated by a single candle, it was presumably sketched in pencil or crayon and then finished in watercolours with a  fine brush.  Despite its small  size, it is finely worked with a precision akin to that of miniature painting, with especial attention to the fall of light from the candle flame.  Its size and subject suggest a scene from the artist’s travels.

The domestic scene centres on the white child wearing a low-necked white dress.  She seems to hold some red-spotted fabric, which could be needlework or an apron and is seated behind a small table which holds some scraps of paper or pale fabric as well as the candlestick, which throws shadows to either side.  To the left sits an older girl of African ancestry, shown in profile, with her right arm raised as if in animated conversation. She wears an indigo-dyed patterned dress with a white shawl over her shoulder. Across to the right is a young boy of African ancestry, in profile, seated rather awkwardly with hands on his thighs, wearing a blue jacket over an open-necked white shirt and pants of the blue-and-white striped fabric typically sold to plantation owners for slave clothing.   [see for instance striped pants and blue jacket of workers depicted by William Clark in Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, 1823 and the sisters in Emma Jones Soyer picture currently on loan to Tate Britain]

Both Black youngsters look towards the White infant, whose lowered gaze is directed towards the tall doll stood on the opposite side of the table, which appears to make up a quartet of figures, as in a nursery game.  The boy looks up shyly while the older girl appears emphatically engaged.    The room is shown as sparsely furnished, presumably to enhance the pictorial  effect of the intimately and tenderly composed group. 

One’s immediate impression is that, if the drawing has come from a sketchbook, it was executed by a member of the family, or perhaps a visitor, struck by the candle-lit image of the blond child and her dark attendants.  Whoever the artist, s/he had some art training, for the group is skilfully portrayed and rendered, in an accomplished ‘conversation piece’ manner.   One’s impression is certainly of a directly observed scene, of children within an actual household.

The overall feeling is of domestic harmony, but there is no evident affection between the children. The boy indeed looks uncomfortable, even anxious, although the miniature scale and possible limitations of the artist’s skill may be responsible for over-interpretation here.    In any case, the grouping firmly endorses a racialised hierarchy, with the white child and her doll centre stage and the Black attendants, who must be enslaved, as subordinate.

 Where are they?  Intriguingly, the now-detached label gives the date, location and names of the sitters:    1822, Gloria Cottage, and from left to right Maria, Dolly, Emma and ‘Cammondongo’ (or something similar).

Until Gloria Cottage can be satisfactorily located – and assuming the inscription is that of the artist -  what can be deduced from the label?  The handwriting, plus the term ‘cottage’ indicate an Anglophone setting, as do the names Emma and Dolly.  Emma was especially popular in this era, shown in its adoption by Lord Nelson’s paramour Emma Hamilton and in Jane Austen’s choice for a fictional heroine.    So is this the home of an English family?  Taken with the date 1822, the presence of young Black inmates  attending a privileged white infant strongly suggests a colonial setting, where African-ancestry ‘house slaves’ typically made up the domestic workforce.  This could be in the Caribbean or the United States.   The doll appears to point towards the latter,  although toys being portable objects that travelled with a family, it could also be European.  It certainly looks an elite, manufactured item, not homemade.

If the setting is Caribbean, contemporary topographical illustrations of islands there can be invoked.   As Dr Johnson famously said when raising his glass, ‘Here’s to the next insurrection of the Negroes in Jamaica!’ because the enslaved population were in regular revolt.  Plantation owners sought to counter this, plus the calls for abolition that were recurrent within Britain, by presenting the Caribbean colonies as peaceful, productive, well-governed.   Clark’s Ten Views of Antigua, was preceded by James Hakewill’s  Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica from Drawings made in the years 1820 and 1821, published as aquatints in London 1824.

As Miles Ogborn has noted, these colonialist images ‘present Jamaica in terms of a Georgic landscape of agricultural labour: a sublime landscape of mountains, rivers and forests or a picturesque landscape of ordered settlement’. [British Library online].  Enslaved Jamaicans working this idyllic land are presented as pictorial staffage, which visually occludes the actuality of European owners and African-ancestry human livestock.

(Curiously, at Montego Bay in Jamaica today is an air bnb named ‘Glory Cottage’, sited in the grounds of  a mansion named ‘Victory’.  The names surely allude to the post-Napoleonic era, though on googlemaps the ‘cottage’ is new built and despite its well-wooded surroundings the mansion is not much older.)

Another plausible location for the present work is indicated by the names identifying the subsidiary sitters and in particular the boy called ‘Cammondongo’.  This can hardly be a proper name, even for an enslaved person.    It must be a phonetic rendering of the Portuguese word camundongo, for a house-mouse of the Beatrice Potter kind.   It is in familiar use in Brazil, and seems apt to the presentation of the timid boy in this group, whom we may suppose was nicknamed ‘mouse’.

A Brazilian location for Gloria Cottage sets the inquiry in a new direction, which proves unexpectedly promising.   In Rio de Janeiro is the old-established district of Gloria, named after the cathedral there.  The wonders of internet searching reveal references to this in the travel book  Journal of a voyage to Brazil and residence there during part of the years 1821, 1822, 1823 composed by Maria  Graham  and published in London in 1824 by Longmans and Murray.   Mrs Graham (later Lady Calcott) was the wife of a British naval commander who accompanied her husband en route for his posting in Chile.   Her voyage there and back [minus husband who died at sea] involved two visits to Brazil. On the return journey she stayed at Rio for several weeks.    Her book is illustrated with twenty topographical engravings based on her own sketches,  for as her narrative makes clear, Mrs Graham was always on the lookout for scenic views and local colour. Plate VII is ‘a view of Rio from the Gloria Hill’; vignette III shows ‘slaves dragging a hogshead through the streets’.

Maria Graham was well-educated and resourceful, her journal being chiefly devoted to political personalities and events in Brazil at the moment when the colony was detaching itself from Portuguese control.  Like other Britons of the time, she opposed slavery in principle, but regarded it benignly in Brazil, believing that it was in slave-owners’ self-interest to treat their workers well.  Like other Britons, she deplored the trade that brought Africans to Brazil from other Portuguese territories; her book includes figures for slaves ‘imported’ from Angola, Cabinda. Mozambique and Quelimane in 1821 (21,199) and 1822 (24,934). Elsewhere she remarks that ‘new negroes’ were ‘docile from fear’, having suffered in the slave ships and markets.

‘We then came to the hill called the Gloria, from the name of the church dedicated to N.S.da Gloria, on the eminence immediately overlooking the sea’, Graham recorded in her journal for 31 December 1822. ‘The hill is green and wooded and studded with countryhouses’ [sic]  [p.167]   Shortly afterwards she met one William May,  a long-term resident in Brazil whom she had known in Britain, and with whose wife she became good friends. Later, she became a neighbour of the Mays on the Gloria hill.  She also met Augustus Erle, ‘an ingenious young artist’  who spent seven years in Brazil painting portraits and landscapes, before being marooned on Tristan da Cunha and travelling on to Australia and New Zealand.   

My best guess, therefore, is that the present watercolour scene was drawn by Maria Graham Calcott and depicts a European family home in the Gloria district of Rio da Janeiro.  More research into the residents of Rio at this date may yield more information about the May family – or another neighbouring one with an infant daughter.   Equally, further research into the life of Maria Calcott could confirm or disprove this conjecture.