Given her bib apron, it makes far more sense for her sleeves to be in the context of a long history of children’s gowns instead of a very recent fad for adult wear. Portrait of Elizabeth Leigh, ca. However, it is entirely possible that Martin or someone else decided that Dido should be dressed in this way. Madame de Pompadour was the alluring chief mistress of King Louis XV, but few people know her dark history—or the chilling secret shared by her and Louis. A lady wearing a pink turban, Late 1770s. 1760. In 18th-century ideologies, class, whiteness, and worth were inextricably linked. 16 & 17), Elizabeth’s hair is years out of fashion for the 1770s. Mezzotint, paper; 35.4 x 25.1 cm. 4). 2). 1733. “Court and City: Fantasies of Domination.” in Bindman, David, Henry Louis Gates, and Karen C. C. Dalton. But Amma Asante, Misan Sagay and Damian Jones saw Dido’s potential and made a movie about her story: Belle (2013) (Fig. In other words, rich white people just were better, and their station in society was their rightful place. Portrait of Hester Thrale and her daughter Hester, ca. Source: Wikimedia Commons. But it was extremely unusual at this time for a mixed-race child – who had been born to a former enslaved mother – to be raised not as a servant, but as part of an aristocratic British family. We’re always looking for your input! One of the women, now identified as Dido Elizabeth Belle, looks over with a cheeky, enigmatic smile, as if daring her viewer to figure her out. 7 - Carington Bowles (British, 1724-1793). The spelling of Bell had now become Belle, which is consistent with all later written records that we have for Dido. Hair is the easiest aspect of dress that one can alter in order to keep up with fashion, and thus the most important detail of this painting for dating it. 20 - Jean-Étienne Liotard (Swiss, 1702-1789). She loves Octavia Butler, Rocky IV, and the TV show Museum Secrets. It simply does not make sense for an eighteen-year-old woman to be wearing a child’s bib apron and a hairstyle ten to fifteen years out of date. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund. She also received an annual allowance. Dido’s exact position within Lord Mansfield’s household is unclear, but the evidence suggests that she was brought up as a lady alongside her cousin Elizabeth Murray. Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery, WAG 10502. purchased 1984. However, while this costume is not conventional dress, it is an artistic convention: having one’s portrait painted in this kind of white wrap dress in a scenic background was exactly the fashion in 1770s England, as well as in the decades before and after (Fig. The only known portrait of Dido Belle shows her standing beside her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray on the terrace at Kenwood. 8). Instead of a subservient position, as would have been the custom of the time, Belle was painting on equal levelling as her white cousin, the painting showing the affection they shared for each other. There is a hint of a sheer tucker along her neckline, and she accessorized with a simple string of pearls and matching earrings. 21), so neither her necklace nor Dido’s pearl jewelry is out of place. Years later, I was using her phone when I made an utterly chilling discovery. We now know that Dido was a gentlewoman in her own right and accord her more agency in the creation of this painting (English Heritage), but perhaps that was their goal all along: to create a work depicting equal status, while allowing viewers outside of the family to frame the relationship in a societally-acceptable way. Or more specifically in Belle’s case, gained through the transatlantic slave trade. There is not extensive knowledge about the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, especially her later years, but she is mostly known from a painting of her and her cousin. In one of Justice Murray’s most famous cases, he declared that slavery was “so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it,” yet it was supported. Lindsay had certainly been involved in the capture of several foreign ships, including French, Dutch and Spanish – not all of which were slave trade ships – and in 1762 he had fought in the battle for Havana, where Spanish ships were taken. While adult women donned them in other countries, in England bibbed aprons in formal portraiture were an “iconographical [marker] of childhood” (Fig. What stands out most about Dido’s portrayal in this portrait is not her gown, her turban, or even her unusually vivacious air, which is comparable to Viscountess Crosbie’s in figure 8: It is the fact that she and her cousin are not dressed in the same style. Portrait of a Young Woman in Powder Blue, ca. 1765. Only very young children wore their hair low and unstyled (Fig. 22 - Joshua Reynolds (British, 1723-1792). The Royal Navy’s ships were used to protect British trade routes, and up until 1807 and the abolition of the British slave trade this included protection of the British slavers as well as capture of enemy ships and their cargo as prizes. The conclusion we arrive at is that this was painted in the late 1760s and Dido and Elizabeth appear to our modern eyes much older than they actually were at the time of this painting – not unusual for art in this era (Beales 379). Oil on canvas; 240.7 x 147.3 cm (94 3/4 x 58 in). Oil on canvas. Instead, it is in the rounded style popular in Britain from approximately 1763-68, seen on the sitter in figure 23. . It is doubtful that she is wearing a robe à la française with loose back pleats, as that had mostly gone out of popular fashion by this point (Leventon 167). In addition, Europeans often conflated peoples from completely different countries, so it came to be that any person of color in Europe who came near a white person with money and leisure time might find themselves suddenly be-turbaned (like Omai, the Polynesian man in figure 10). Self-portrait, ca. Lady in Turkish dress, ca. “Framing Sensibility: The Female Couple in Art and Narrative.”. Both teams appear to have used silk satin and referenced 18th-century bedgown patterns for Dido’s outfit. Belle was born in 1761 in the West Indies to Maria Belle, an enslaved African woman, and Sir John Lindsay, an aristocratic naval officer who had taken Maria as a concubine after finding her on a Spanish slave ship. Accessed 12 July 2020. Because, as will sometimes happen when an entire supremacist ideology is under threat, this also produced a metric ton of anxiety. Charlotte and Ferdinande von Hochberg, sisters of Hans Heinrich VI, ca. In an ironic twist, Murray was Lord Chief Justice, the second-highest judge in the country at a time where legal tensions over race, slavery, and freedom were reaching their peak. In 2013 the film Belle, starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, brought a fictionalised version of Dido’s story to an international audience. Mary, Countess Howe, ca. The basket of tropical fruit she carries and the turban with expensive feather that she wears suggest an exotic difference from her more conventionally styled white cousin, who is sitting reading a book. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Oil on canvas; 179 x 168 cm. Dido’s father was British officer John Lindsay, who gave her into the care of his uncle William Murray at some point before her sixth birthday (English Heritage). 11 - Cornelis Troost (Dutch, 1696-1750). Fig. 14 - Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727–1788). The first record of Maria is on Dido’s baptism entry of 1766, at St George’s Church, Bloomsbury, in which Maria Bell is noted as the mother, and Dido Elizabeth is five years old. Source: MFA, Fig. 1775. Madame de Pompadour didn't just share King Louis XV's bed, she also shared his power. Oil on canvas; 76.8 x 63.5 cm (30 1/4 x 25 in). Art Museum of São Paulo, MASP.00196. 18). Its presence on Elizabeth tells the viewer that she has not yet entered puberty – strange, in a painting dated to her eighteenth year – and gives us a lead to find dress comparisons (Adams 3). From 1756 to 1788 Dido’s great-uncle Lord Mansfield was Lord Chief Justice, the most powerful judge in England. As Dido passes by her seated cousin, Elizabeth reaches out a hand to catch her – ‘stay a moment’, she seems to be saying. This is the one clue in Dido’s outfit that this was not painted in the 1770s. Oil on canvas; 49.5 x 39.4 cm. Factinate is a fact website that is dedicated to finding and sharing fun facts about science, history, animals, films, people, and much more. The Countess wears fashionable dress for the mid-1760s, including three-tier engageantes, or sleeve ruffles, and the upper arm is plain. 19) (Müller 98-99). Sholtz, Mackenzie Anderson. Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay (1761-1804) and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray (1760-1825), c. 1778. At Scone Palace in Perth, Scotland, a 1779 painting by portrait artist David Martin hangs. This 18th-century grand manner portrait of two cousins juxtaposes fashionable turquerie with luxurious but conventional children’s clothing. In 1805, she died at the age of 43. Museo di Roma. But then again, slavery as a whole in England died a slow death. 24 - Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727-1788). Philip Mould Ltd. “Portrait of William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield (1705 – 1793), c.1770.”, Roulston, Chris. Fig. Dido has finished her outfit with a strand of pearls and pearl earrings, and has fashionable rouged lips and cheeks just like Elizabeth’s. Kenna Libes holds a Master's degree in Public Humanities from Brown University and has worked in textile conservation, curation, and collections management at various institutions along the East Coast. You see, there were too many colonists making money, rising in power, and solidifying their worth to shut it down. Source: MASP. In her video “Researching David Martin’s Portrait of Dido Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray,” (2019) Nic Loven describes looking through Martin’s paintings and discovering that Dido’s turban cloth was an idiosyncrasy of Martin’s: “Most interestingly, we observed a textile, or at least surface decoration, that occurs in five portraits. This interpretation is perhaps too optimistic; Martin could have easily depicted her without a turban, or with one in a different color. She was one year younger than Elizabeth. Overlining the entire gown in a transparent fabric may have been an artistic decision and not something that was present on the real dress. In the 1770s: Maximum size was reached – a towering structure supplemented by feathers, jewels, ribbons, and seemingly almost anything a lady could perch on top of her head.” (242). The sitter in the white gown to the left is Dido Elizabeth Belle. He presided over a number of court cases that examined the legality of the slave trade. Given the (fashionable) informality of her gown, we cannot guess whether she is wearing stays or not, but she would certainly have worn basic linens underneath to keep the gown clean. They are quoted in period sources as enjoying each other’s company; it is clear that Dido was loved and accepted within his household (English Heritage). Interestingly, they decided not to recreate the pink ensemble, claiming difficulty and expense (partially due to its transparent overlay). Martin (Fig. Fashionable turbans at this time derived from Turkish and Indian men’s clothing, but became divorced from their true context and culture of origin. Elizabeth’s bibbed apron (or pinafore) is important to our understanding of this painting. We know that she was taught to read, write, play music and was graceful and at ease in the presence of invited guests. Elizabeth was also brought up in the care of Lord Mansfield at Kenwood after her mother’s death in 1766. A Stitch in Time, 2018. Posted by Kenna Libes | Last updated Aug 10, 2020 | Published on Aug 3, 2020 | 1760-1769, 1770-1779, 18th century, artwork analysis, BIPOC. These Africans would then be transported through the infamous “middle passage” to work in America, whereupon the ships would pick up raw goods (provided by slave labor) to carry back to England to turn into manufactured goods, starting the whole process over again. We find a closer comparison in figure 22, a detail from figure 6 above, which features a British girl of about twelve years of age. (Detail) Elisabeth Cruttenden, b. Belle, by being educated and privileged in her class position but undeniably black, pried apart that supposedly inextricable triad. The portrait was painted at Kenwood and sees St Paul's Cathedral in the background and features Lady Elizabeth and Dido Belle sitting on a bench, Dido seemingly coyly point to her face and holding a … Another commonly seen gesture is for the white person to be touching the Black person fondly in some way, and for the Black person to be holding or offering flowers or fruit (Waterfield 144). Loven, Nic. Children’s gowns, however, had pleating or ruching decorating the upper arms from the 1730s onwards, and while they sometimes had engageantes, Elizabeth’s short, unruffled sleeves are a clear sign of childhood. The kind of white turban we see on Dido especially is associated with this trend, specifically as part of servant uniforms for young Black boys (Fig. Later that year Dido married a steward (a senior servant) named John Davinier, originally from France, and the couple went on to have three sons – twin boys, Charles and John, baptised in 1795, and then another son, William Thomas, baptised in 1800. While caricatures are generally not accurate depictions of women’s dress, they can be useful in pointing out certain aspects that stood out to the artist. Mansfield was clearly aware of this and in his will of 1782 he made sure to protect his niece’s rights, clearly stating that Dido was a free woman. While much has been made of their “presentation more or less as social equals” (Butchart 6:10) and Martin’s predilection for this kind of costume (Loven 3:00), these sitters are not truly being presented in the same way. That system is strong, it has endurance, and the victories against it are always met with retaliation. Butchart, Amber, Ninya Mikhaila, Harriet Waterhouse, and Hannah Marples. No fashionable adult woman in this decade would be caught without elaborate lace or embroidery-covered engageantes (Fig. The connection becomes more obvious when we see a gown like Dido’s styled with low-waisted belts and fur-trimmed coats in addition to the turban and/or feather (Fig. Video. Elizabeth was just a year older than Dido and they would have been close companions. In 2018, the BBC4 show A Stitch in Time followed fashion historian Amber Butchart as period tailor Ninya Mikhaila and her team worked to recreate the gown and turban in her size (as they do for every historical costume recreation in the series) (Fig. Source: MAH, Fig. Iveagh Bequest, 1929. That she was kept legally enslaved throughout his entire life painfully illustrates the absolute, structural inequalities she lived under, even as a member of the upper class and even as a “loved” relation of the Murrays. “Dido Elizabeth Belle: A Black Girl at Kenwood.”. In the face of her threat, whiteness and its supposed propriety closed rank, and her wealth privilege was not enough to cancel out the supposed sin of her being born black. My mom never told me how her best friend died. Oil on canvas; 243.2 x 154.3 cm. 15 - Joshua Reynolds (British, 1723-1792). BBC4. Fig. 25). 5 - Nicolas Lancret (French, 1690–1743). In the most significant of these, the case of James Somerset (1772), Lord Mansfield ruled that slavers could not forcibly send any slaves in England out of the country. It was a fashion statement on the part of white women to don turbans like this, as seen in the previous figure, but we cannot divorce our interpretation of Dido’s clothing from her Blackness, as Martin’s or Murray’s relationship with her skin color may have influenced the clothing choices in the painting. Perhaps Lord Mansfield was loath to see her grow up? If you have suggestions or corrections, please contact us. Pszczynie: Muzeum Zamkowym. Read about the remarkable lives of some of the women who have left their mark on society and shaped our way of life – from Anglo-Saxon times to the 20th century. They were probably around seven to ten years old in this portrait, which may explain the childish delight of Dido’s pose. As Dido had been born in 1761, this would place Maria as a young mother of around 15 years of age at the time of Dido’s birth. His specialty lay in three-quarter-length portraits (Fig. The price to confirm her freedom is dated 22 August 1774, the manumission transaction for ‘the sum of two hundred Spanish milled dollars ... paid by Maria Belle a Negro Woman Slave about twenty eight years of age’. While turbans do appear in portraits like this, wrap gowns are more common. 1752, ca. Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dido Elizabeth Belle and Sarah Gadon as Lady Elizabeth Murray in “Belle", 2014. Source: Fergus Hall Master Paintings, Fig. These very gestures are being undertaken by Dido and Elizabeth. Oil on canvas; 73.7 x 62.2 cm (29 x 24 ½ in). It worked like this: England would provide manufactured goods to be shipped down to Africa to buy enslaved people like Belle’s mother Maria. Unsurprisingly, England’s ruling classes sought to distance themselves from the immoral labor they were extracting from the colonies and elsewhere, even as this labor kept their homes tastefully decorated, their dresses in the latest fashions, and the finest foods on their tables. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 49.7.57. The portrait of the two women is highly unusual in 18th-century British art for showing a black woman as the equal of her white companion, rather than as a servant or slave. And yet here Belle still stands, smiling. The average age of marriage at this time was in one’s mid-twenties, and indeed, Lady Murray married politician George Finch-Hatton in 1785 when she was twenty-five years old (Olsen 31). Dido appears like any other fashionable young woman painted by David Martin.” (2:46). Source: BM, Fig. While some rare paintings do feature older children with caps and cropped haircuts, Elizabeth’s hair is styled – just not in the 1778 fashion. 17 - Laurent Pécheux (Italian, 1729-1821). The family commissioned a painting of Dido and Elizabeth. It is in the grand manner style of portraiture, with an awe-inspiring background and a lifelike treatment of the sitters and their clothing. 1775. We want our readers to trust us. Lord Mansfield was a staunch abolitionist, and stated clearly in his will that Dido was a free woman; he also left an annuity of £100 to support her, much larger than her previous yearly allowance of £20 (English Heritage, Butchart 18:21). In large, complicated portraits of this kind, every detail is important and symbolic, and it is likely that neither girl had full agency over her wardrobe for this painting. When we do, we depend on our loyal, helpful readers to point out how we can do better. Dido’s clothing does not help to answer the question of dating; while her Turkish-style ensemble was indeed fashionable in 1778, extremely similar outfits were worn in portraiture from the 1720s to the 1780s. She believes firmly in bringing a working knowledge of garment construction and historical techniques into analyses of historic dress. It was painted on the grounds of the Kenwood estate in Hampstead, with a bit of London on the horizon at bottom left, and is currently dated to c. 1778 (Scone Palace). What first appears to be a white stomacher on her front is actually the bib of an apron, and because it covers the center front of her bodice we cannot tell what the dress actually looks like. 1763. 19 - George Romney (British, 1734–1802). Husbands hiding things from wives, mothers from children, and generation from generation. The two girls in figure 21 are approximately eleven and twelve, and their gowns, complete with childish bib aprons, look similar to Elizabeth’s. She was not freed until 1793, when William Murray died and released her in his will, which also made her an heiress. Fitted-back round gowns were commonly worn, but most women tended to have portraits painted wearing more complex fashions. Do you question the accuracy of a fact you just read? 16 - George Romney (British, 1734-1802). Oil on canvas; 50.8 x 43.2 cm. 19). There is evidence of African people in Roman Britain and black communities have been present since at least 1500. Private collection. Historical costumers have latched on to Dido’s ensemble and recreated it at least twice, producing research and videos around their versions. Join presenter Charles Rowe every Thursday as we bring the history of our sites to life with news, views and expert interviews. Source: Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd. Oil; 148.6 × 140.3 cm (58.5 × 55.2 in). Graphite pencil, black and red chalk; 24.2 x 18.9 cm. But this is not an unheard-of convention in British portraiture featuring Black servants (Fig. It was incredibly effective, keeping the “white, rich, worthy” triad strong and pervasive. The enormous hairstyles came from France, and while some women ignored them, those that did tended to be either older, less fashionable, or living in places like the colonies that did not keep up with the French mode (Callahan 136). Want to tell us to write facts on a topic? I knew that she was going to take it badly, but I had no idea about the insane lengths she would go to just to get revenge and mess with my life. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens., 2008.7. Portrait de Marie-Thérèse Liotard (1763-1793), fille de l'artiste, vue de profil à gauche, 1779. Our credibility is the turbo-charged engine of our success. London: British Museum, J,5.108. It may not display all the features of this and other websites. 27 - Crow's Eye Productions (English). Once in England, she became the ward of Sir Lindsay’s uncle, William Murray. See Reynolds’ mother-daughter portrait in figure 15; both are depicted the same fashions, Fig. However, these were certainly not inherent traits; they were borne on the backs of the lower classes and people of color. Catherine of Aragon is now infamous as King Henry VIII’s rejected queen—but few people know her even darker history. Source: MdR, Fig. 8 - Joshua Reynolds (British, 1723-1792). Oil on canvas; 236 x 145.5 cm (92.9 x 57.2 in). During this time Lindsay fathered more illegitimate children, with Dido being the eldest of five children by five different mothers, of whom four were certainly of African heritage. An eighteen-year-old in a late 1770s portrait should be dressed similarly to the women in figures 16 and 17, so why does she look so different?
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