Figures in the Frame: Black Artists in Victorian Britain

Author: Madeleine Haddon

Genres: Narrative cultural history

Fanny Eaton's face hangs in some of Britain's great institutional collections, painted by the Pre-Raphaelites as a queen, a biblical heroine and a figure of classical beauty, yet the Jamaican-born model who lived and worked in west London has been almost entirely absent from the story those paintings are usually made to tell.

Madeleine Haddon, an art historian who works in a museum and writes from the same part of London her subjects called home, begins with that absence and widens it into a recovery of the Black artists, performers and musicians who shaped Victorian culture from within it, among them the actor Ira Aldridge, the painter Robert Duncanson, the sculptor Edmonia Lewis and the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Reading each artwork as a portal onto the life behind it, she sets these figures in conversation with one another to make the case that Black creativity was foundational to Victorian culture and never marginal to it, and she does so with the narrative pull of a trade book and the authority of a curator.

For readers of Ekow Eshun's The Strangers, Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Miranda Kaufmann's Black Tudors.