A museum in Liverpool is seeking information on a mysterious young subject in a painting by Pre-Raphaelite artist William Lindsay Windus. Known only as The Black Boy, the identity of the individual depicted in torn clothing remains a mystery. The sitter could be one of many children of colour in Liverpool at the time, including some who worked in the merchant navy or could have been employed as servants. The museum has set up an online appeal for information, hoping that someone with knowledge of the subject’s life will come forward.
The 1844 canvas is the only painted portrait of a Black child in the museum’s collection of which it is aware, according to researcher Kate Haselden. “You could argue that Black people are quite often represented in paintings or in art as anonymous beings or in scenes of slavery,” she said. “Single-figure Black-sitter portraits are very rare… It’s especially rare to have a finished, sensitive, well-executed painting.”
Windus, who was 22 at the time, painted the portrait after working up to it through four or five earlier depictions. The artist managed to convey the boy’s innocence while also inviting empathy from the viewer by having the boy engage them directly in moist eyes. Haselden believes the the subject was likely encountered during Windus’s frequent trips to Liverpool, where he stayed with his mother at a hotel located in what was then the red-light district.
In 1891, a catalogue entry claimed that the sitter was a stowaway whom Windus had taken in, and who was subsequently discovered and reunited with parents. Haselden said that the Liverpool boycott of slave-produced cotton, which began in 1860 and ended during the US Civil War, shows the city’s recognition of the issue’s complexity. “I think Liverpool acknowledges its role within the system of transatlantic slavery, but there’s also been a lot of active efforts to disassociate and distance the city from that reputation of being pro-slavery,” she said
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