Belle by Paula Byrne Read Free Book Online Page A

‘double portrait’ has a long and distinguished tradition. Typically, the subject would be a husband and wife, a mother and child, or a pair of sisters. In its composition, this portrait conforms to the model for representing a pair of sisters. One could readily imagine the sitting girl as an older sister, studious, conventional and full of good sense. And the standing one as a younger sister, with a little bit of wildness or rebellion about her, and a great deal of passion – of ‘sensibility’, as they would have said in the eighteenth century. The rarity, however, comes from the colour of their skin. This is, as far as we know, the only portrait of its era to show a white girl and a black one together in a sisterly pose.
    London is in the background. The viewer can readily make out the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Behind the girls is a garden of mature trees that leads down to a lake with a bridge. The season would appear to be high summer. This is clearly the estate of a wealthy man, of someone who would be proud to show off his daughters. A double portrait of this kind was often painted to commemorate a special occasion – a birthday, a coming of age perhaps, or a party or event held on the estate in the summer months when the gardens were at their very best. But surely if a wealthy man in eighteenth-century England really did have one daughter who was white and another who was black, he would have been ashamed of the fact? There would have been the stain not only of illegitimacy but, even more shockingly for the time, of inter-racial sex. You would have thought that the black girl would be concealed below stairs, not celebrated in a large portrait. To a contemporary viewer, the image would have been startling: a black girl, expensively dressed, and on an almost equal footing with her white companion.
    Almost equal , because the white girl occupies the foreground of the painting. But the viewer is left with little doubt that it is the black girl who has captured the imagination of the artist. She is dressed in an exotic style, bearing colours that give the painter the opportunity to show off the full range of his palette. The dress, though as expensive and beautiful as the white girl’s, signals her difference. The sheer shawl looks Indian, as do the turban and feather. Intriguingly, a tartan or plaid shawl is tied around her waist. Could she have Scottish heritage?
    The white girl is made to look demure – the wreath of rosebuds in her hair suggests virginity – while her black companion sports one of the most fashionable accessories of the day: an ostrich feather, as popularised by the leading fashion icon of the era, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Georgiana created her first great stir in 1775, when the British Ambassador in Paris, Lord Stormont, presented her with a four-foot-long ostrich feather, which she contrived to incorporate within a spectacular hairdo. From then on, every fashionable lady wanted an ostrich feather – to the extent that the poor bird was hunted almost to extinction in North Africa. Lord Stormont was the father of the white girl in the picture.
    The language of painting in the eighteenth century was heavily symbolic. The basket of exotic produce points to the black girl’s foreign background, with the ripe fruits – grapes and figs and peaches – suggesting her lusciousness. At a literal level, she is carrying fruit that she has picked in the orangery or the hothouse for the dinner table of the big house. But at a metaphoric level she is herself being compared to a sweet foreign fruit flourishing on English soil (a wealthy man with an orangery or glasshouse could grow his own pomegranates and pineapples, but even a middle-ranking householder who was prepared to pay could go to Covent Garden market and buy exotic produce that had been cultivated in the Tarring Fig Gardens of Sussex). The grapes are a mix of black and white, happily entwined in what could be an allusion to some