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.
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