who was the Prince Regent's black servant?

In 1787  Sir Joshua Reynolds exhibited a major portrait of the Prince of Wales [later Geo IV]  attended by valet who is shown fastening the prince's belt. 

This was the premier picture at that year's Royal Academy in May.  It is visible behind sitter and artist at the Summer Exhibition opening in May that year. A bit hard to see amidst crowd of persons and pictures [and dogs] but very clearly centre of the display, as befit the royal figure.

As it happened, the campaign to abolish the transatlantic slave trade had just been launched.  Reynolds was a supporter and signatory to the first of many petitions, as the campaigners were not successful until 1807.

So who was the manservant depicted?    in a good number of earlier aristocratic portraits, attendants of African appearance are often included as exotic accessories, some of  which will have been painted from life, others 'copied in' from unrelated studies.  Given the Prince of Wales' prominence at this period, and the nature of London 'society' centred on the Court, it seems unlikely that Reynolds' portrait featured a generic valet.  Surely this young man was one of the Prince's attendants? 

Letters from Reynolds to the Prince of Wales's accountant show the portrait was still for sale a year later.  'The only Picture that he[Reynolds] has finished of His Royal Highness since the account sent in the last year, is a whole length with a black servant, which is still at his house, the price of that is two hundred Guineas',  reads the letter of 22 April 1788 to Mr Robinson. 'There is another whole length of the same price which is not quite finished.'   Perhaps the prince had inquired about purchasing it, though he did not. .

Then on 24 April Reynolds wrote again: 'There is another whole length which is intended for Lord Charlemont which according to Sir Thomas Dundas's opinion ought to be copied from the picture  of H.R.H with the black servant, and to have one sitting to make it an original.'  

Do these references imply that the 'black servant' was an employee in the royal househoold?  

Is it possible to find out who he was?

John Ystumllyn

The sitter in this anonymous portait, inscribed with his name and the date 11 May 1754, was a servant in the Wynne household at Ystumllyn, near Criccieth in north Wales. The date and manner of his arrival are obscure.   One account of his origins, seemingly from his own, states that he was hunting waterfowl in a woodland stream when white men seized him and took him to their ship.  Which would imply a West Africa birthplace, transport to Caribbean enslavement and thence to Britain as a boy.   He could be about 12 in the portait?  so a posible birth date in early 1840s?

In Wales he became an outdoor servant, gardener, adept and skilled woodworker.  He learnt Welsh and English and was baptised and inevitably re-named.  John was the generic name given to male servants (presumably to save employers having to recall others) and Ystumllyn that of the estate, where he was also known as Jac Dhu or 'Black Jack'. Local anecdotes tell of his popularity with female servants and of various employments in the area.  

Ystumllyn house 1794

In April 1768 he married Margaret Gruffydd in Dolgellau, with whom he had seven children, only five of whom survived into adulthood.  One of the latter was named Richard Jones.  John and Margaret were employed as stewards at nearby Ynysgain (where the landowners were Joneses)  then later the couple worked at another Wynne property where a cottage called Y Nhyra Isaf 'was given to John together with a small field by Ellis Wynne Esq in recognition for his service. 

He died in 1786, in his forties and was buried at a now-remote churchyard at Ynyscynhaeren, inland between Criccieth and Portmadoc.  Some years later a gravestone was installed, with an inscription by Dafydd Sion Siams, bard from Penrhyndeudraeth which translates as 'Born in the Indies, to Wales I came to be baptised. On this spot, a grey slate marks my cold resting place'. 

Then in 1888  a brief biogaphy was written by Alltud Eifion, a bard from Tremadoc, whose grandfather had been the doctor who attended John at the end of his life.  Translated, the title reads 'John Ystummllyn or Jack Black, the history of his life and traditions about him since his capture in the wilds of Africa until his death; his descendants etc, etc, together with a picture of him in the year 1754'.  The illustration is a woodcut of the oil portrait that now hangs in Ynyscynhaeren church.

Prince Alamayou, age 7

Reginald Easton, portrait of Alamaiou, 1868, Royal Collection.

The Royal Collection contains this lovely miniature of Prince Alamayou,  the Ethiopian hostage brought to Britain after the battle for Magdala and the death of his father Tewodros.   Nowadays more correctly spelt as Alemayehu, he was made a ward of the British crown and became an object of special attention from Victoria,  partly because his 'guardian', Captain Speedy lived on the Isle of Wight near the royal residence of Osborne House. 

This portrait by a very obscure artist  (in watercolour on ivory)  measures just 95 by 80mm.  It was painted at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, which must mean at the same time as Alamayou was photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron, who had a house at Freshwater, as well as by other local photographers..

Julia Margaret Cameron, Alemayehu, 1868

Alemayehu was sent off to be educated at British public schools and then to train for the army.  Sadly he died of pleurisy in 1879 and was buried at Windsor Castle.  Queen Victoria's art collection contains a number of pottrait images, see here

https://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/trails/black-and-asian-history-and-victorian-britain/prince-alamayu

including a life-size bronze bust by sculptor F.J. Williamson commissioned by Victoria after Alemayehu's death and now at Osborne.  

F J Williamson, Prince Alemayou, 1880, Royal Collection

The various spoils that the British seized from the royal treasury in Magdala are now in the V&A

Blackness and Visibility 1600-1800

CALL FOR IMAGES 

Journal18, a journal of eighteenth-century art and culture, have published a call for papers in order to create a rather fascinating online resource 'chronicling the representation and regulation of black bodies in Europe, c.1600-1800'.

Interested participants are invited to submit artworks (submitted either as copyright-free digital images or as hyperlinks) that correspond to this theme. The submitted pieces will then be woven into a large digital timeline for researchers, educators and students.

http://www.journal18.org/wp-content/uploads/Journal18_Timeline_CfP_Jun2020.pdf

....

Hyacinthe Rigaud, Black Archer, M Beaux Arts, Dunkerque

Your little handful of facts

"I like biography far better than fiction myself: fiction is too free. In biography you have your little handful of facts, little bits of a puzzle, and you sit and think, and fit 'em together this way and that, and get up and throw 'em down and say damn, and go out for a walk. And it's real soothing; and when done gives an idea of finish to the writer that is very peacful. Of course it's not really so finished as quite a rotten novel; it always has and always must have the incurable illogicalities of life about it, the fathoms of slack and miles of tedium. Still, that's where the fun comes in; and when you have at last managed to shut up the castle spectre (of dulness) the very outside of his door looks beautiful by contast."

Robert Louis Stevenson, 18 June 1893
warm acknowledgements to Michael Caines for finding this gem (fathoms of slack!)

Black Lives

just one, in fact

FANNY EATON 

drawn by 

Joanna Wells

Albert Moore

Walter Stocks

Simeon Solomon 

Janey Morris in PPE

one to make you smile.

but would Jane have chosen that exact shade of turquoise?