'Finishing Touches' by Alfred Emslie

Has anyone ever seen or read information about the present whereabouts of this painting?

 

It's notable for depicting  a Black artist at work with his wife and daughter in a domestic interior that is part studio and part parlour.  I have long hoped for the re-emergence of  the original on which this illustration is based.

The painting was included in the spring exhibition of 1878 at the Dudley Gallery in London (no.384)  It was placed on the line  so must have been regarded as worthy of notice.

It's not clear if the original was in oils or watercolour - which the Dudley favoured - but the artist is shown in working in oils on a standard-sized portrait canvas, albeit with an elaborate frame already in place, perhaps justified by the title, since final touches could be added up to and beyond exhibition.  The figure on the canvas looks to be three-quarter or full-length.  The whole image is however an invented scene.  It was engraved for the Illustrated London News  (13 April 1878, p.337) 

There are two critical comments on the picture from the ILN,  which have to be slightly censored but still retain their offensive quality.

The first (9 March 1878, p 219) is brief:

'Nor is Alfred Emslie's "Finishing Touches" (384) - a swell n**** painting his wife's portrait - destitute of the comic element; and, though the pigment here and there seems forced, may be regarded as in keeping with the negro sense of colour'.

The second (ILN 13 April 1878, p.339) accompanied the engraving:

'Mr Alfed E Emslie has produced an amusing picture in which he sets forth the imitative nature of the negro.  The artist's profile has a touch of the Caucasian about it; and it is this element in his nature which has no doubt prompted him to become a painter; but in the determined action of his extended leg, throwing the whole of his left side  into a straight line, forming the hypotenuse  of the right-angled triangle into which, by the aid of his dressing gown, the rest of the figure falls, is seen the extravagance of the negro.  The ladylike repose of his sitter - who is likely to be his wife and the mother of the ebony little cherub who clambers up so gleefully behind the artist's chair - was probably learned from her white mistress, before the great war in America set the slaves free. We see how apt a pupil she is; and although she cannot change her skin or alter her features, there is a kindly intelligence beaming in her face  and a quiet gentleness in her whole air and aspect, that one feels to be ladylike.  The original picture, which we noticed at the time of its exhibition in the Dudley Gallery, where it occupied the line, is full of sparkling colour.' 

The whole of this is an eloquent example of Victorian racism that does not perceive its racism, but nonetheless seems to regard Emslie's picture as a provocation.

[A good copy of the engraving is in the British Museums collection (2010,7033.6) presented by Donato Esposito]

 

Lord Monboddo's African manservant

 

 

 

On the famous tour of Highland Scotland taken by Dr Samuel Johnson and James Boswell in 1773, the pair stopped off at the estate of jurist Lord Monboddo [aka James Burnett], located in the Mearns [Kincardineshire] south of Aberdeen.    They left on 21 August, according to  Boswell’s journal:

Gory, my lord’s black servant, was sent as our guide, to conduct us to the high road [to Aberdeen]  The circumstance of each of them having a black servant was another point of similarity between Johnson and Monboddo.   I observed how curious it was to see an African in the north of Scotland, with little or no difference of manners from those of the natives.  Dr Johnson laughed to see Gory and Joseph riding together most cordially.  ‘Those two fellows’ said he, ‘one from Africa, the other from Bohemia, seem quite at home’.

Joseph was presumably manservant to either Boswell or Johnson or maybe to both for this excursion.  ‘Gory’ – named from Goree Island, Senegal, one of the slave-trading sites in West Africa -  was employed by Monboddo, who was known for the ‘magnetism of his conversation’ and his ‘paradoxes’ or eccentric opinions, which included pre-Darwinian speculation over the relationship between primates and humans.   The conversation at Monboddo House involved a sort of debate comparing or contrasting the capacities of  ‘the savage and the London shopkeeper’.  To Monboddo citing ‘the savage’s courage’, Johnson responded, ‘it was due to his limited power of thinking’.

With his notorious toast ‘to the next insurrection of the Negroes in Jamaica’, Johnson was of course a notable opponent of enslavement on the grounds of natural justice, though evidently unpersuaded of natural equality.

When Gory was about to part from us, Dr Johnson called to him. ‘Mr Gory, give me leave to ask you a  question! Are you baptized?’  Gory told him he was and confirmed by the Bishop of Durham. [Johnson] then gave him a shilling.

Alfresco Annunciation

 

Way back in 2020 I wrote on the correct title for Elizabeth Siddal's watercolour known as 'Haunted Wood', 

when I drew attention to Rossetti's comparable rendering of the traditional Annunciation with Virgin Mary and Angel Gabriel also in an unusual outdoor setting.

Now I have seen a third contemporary version, by Burne-Jones, in the large and wonderful triptych currently loaned to  the Pre-Raphaelite Drawings exhibition at the Ashmolean.   The triptych is full of details and vignetters, of which this is one 

 :

Not easy to photograph and so a rather rough image.  Mary is not in a wood nor beside a stream but by the well in a walled  garden and the archangel is floating in through the garden door,  Mary's attitude is quite close to that in Siddal's image.  

It makes me wonder again if there is a prototype for an outdoor Annunciation - in 14th century painting, manuscript illumination or a medieval text.  Or is the notion a Pre-Raphaelite invention?