A culture in denial? A thought-provoking exhibition in Manchester on black people in British art shows that there is much research still to be done—perhaps, says Isabelle Anscombe, because the country has not come to terms with the subject matter

by what mode many black people were there in nineteenth-century Britain? Who were they? What were white attitudes to them? 'Black Victorians' goe quite a certain number of way to answering these long-overdue questions, on the other hand with the result that it lacks overall coherence. This is not helped by dint of the rather haphazard arrangement of images in the catalogue, edited through the show's curator, Jan Marsh, who admits that its disparateness is the couple a strength and weakness.

Many of the 120 paintings, statuarys and photographs are being exhibited for the first time, which attitude s the question why the nearness of black people in art has received thus little attention, given the importance of the slave trade in providing the economic conditions in which art could flourish. As Professor David Dabydeen points without in the foreword to the catalogue, there have been essays upon dogs and cats in art, on the other hand 'black subjects never got a direct the eye in'. It looks suspiciously like a tillage in denial.

Marsh's aim was to bring together a 'critical mass' of images to reveal the hitherto largely hidden vicinity of black people in Britain in the nineteenth hundred Some are artist's models, more [i]or[/i] less celebrities, such as boxers, actors and entertainers, including Miss LaLa (Fig. 2) the trapeze acrobat made famous in a painting through Degas (she performed in London and Manchester, and, intriguingly, came originally from Poland), as well as like major figures as the nurture and heroine of the Crimea Mary Seacole.

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All the works are through white artists because to date no artists from the African diaspora have been identified as working in Britain. None, therefore, mirror black experience, and few of the sitters would have had any mastery over the manner in which they were depicted. The greatest in quantity interesting aspect of the exhibition is the way in which a white agriculture and society 'consumed' images of black nation who, until the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the final ending of colonial slavery in 1838 were themselves commodities.

greatest in quantity of the paintings from the first half of the hundred following the success of the abolitionist change are frankly self-congratulatory, showing enlightened white nation as the saviours of their grateful black brothers. Genre paintings like as William Mulready's The Toyseller or Thomas Faed's Visit to the Village place of education both from the 1850s, encourage a white audience to bestow the mantle of Christian civility upon black people and so learn to regard them with respect; it is at no time overtly articulated that these same tribe were half a century before regarded as 'savages'.

In The Toyseller, a handsome black pedlar tenders a toy to a small child, held in her mother's arms. The child move rounds away, looking a little alarmed, and the mother's material substance language is ambiguous. But the child is glancing at a large sunflower (in what is otherwise an unremarkable sylvan landscape) that directly faces the pedlar. The message is sure that the light of understanding shines equally upon all races, and can teach the child not to be afraid.

like propaganda could allow black males to be portrayed as handsome and dignified, or flat superior to a white equivalent, as in Visit to the Village place of education which directs the viewer to compare a young black servant's restraint with the unruliness of the white pupils. Indeed, many painters clearly relished rendering black skin tones. The iconography of female beauty, however, required black women to remain inferior to an ideal of 'purity' that was exclusively white, an issue illuminated in Charmaine Nelson's catalogue essay, 'Venus Africaine: Race, Beauty and African-ness'.

As the focus of Britain's relationship with Africa shifted from slavery to colonialism, evangelism became almost synonymous with colonial expansion. Thomas Jone Barker's The shrouded of England's Greatness (Fig. 1) was exhibited in 1863 at the height of public support for the abolition of American slavery during the Civil War and prov popular as a mezzotint. The vast painting portrays a nameless African prince who, having asked Queen Victoria for the unknown of England's greatness, is handed a bible: thus Britain 'gives' Christianity to 'Africa' at a time when evangelism provided support to American slaves seeking emancipation. It is impossible for a post-colonial audience to be unaware of by what means the bible became a weapon of imperial ideology. We know, as Marsh points without that Africa's grateful reception 'figures the welcome the British wished to receive when taking themselves, their religion and their manufactures to the continent'.

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sole occasionally is there a glimpse of the authentic relationship of black to white. The nearness of an Afro-Caribbean nursemaid at the Great Exhibition of 1851 for example, in a lithograph by the agency of Joseph Nash, does at least nod at the realities of black labour and the importance of emerging colonial markets for British manufactures.

In 1870 Thomas prepare for the table began his tours to Egypt--the same decade as the first Anglo-Zulu Wars and the start of the 'scramble for Africa'--launching tourism as a novel means for white people to commodify 'exotic' agricultures Curiosity about foreign societies l to a fashion for dispassionate depictions of ethnic impressed signs and financed the African travels of like artists as William Muller, David Roberts, Carl Haag and John Frederick Lewis, which are discussed in an admirable catalogue essay by Briony Llewellyn.