Alas, not by a contemporary. A visual re-enactment rather like a dramatised documentary episode. By Victorian stalwart Edward Matthew Ward. One half of a prominent artistic partnership.
EM specialized in multi-figure costume dramas set in the Georgian era. Such as the Scene in Change Alley at the moment the South Sea Bubble burst. Set in 1820, painted and exhibited in 1847. Now in Tate Collection.
Also in Tate Collection is Ward's imagined image of Dr Johnson waiting vainly for admission to Lord Chesterfield's presence.
The two pictures include Africans attendant on fashionable ladies. They advertise Ward's historical knowledge. And perhaps in the South Sea Bubble painting, a reference to the South Sea Company's trading business in enslaved Africans.
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