I like the special diversity of the 18thC image: men, women, dwarfs, giants, the poor, the disabled, the sexual, the oh, you get it.  Instead of generic 'desirables' of types, the eighteenth century sees the emergence of the individual in art as never before.  Certain subjects, such as Hogarth's Shrimp Girl fascinate me, as does the male model in the picture from St Martin's Lane Academy life drawing class.  Sadly, the details of the models' identities are almost always lost in the bustle of London's streets, but not Wilson.

Born in Boston, Wilson arrived in London in the summer of 1810.  Arriving in the city, he sustained an injury and visited a doctor, Anthony Carlisle, who also happened to be the professor of anatomy at the Royal Academy.  Carlisle immediately saw his patient's potential, and hauled him into life classes.  Thomas Lawrence was particularly impressed, and declared Wilson 'the finest figure He has ever seen, combining the character & perfection of many of the Antique statues'.  This is no mean praise: 18thC artists, particularly those of the early Royal Academy, studied the figures from antiquity in a mathematical fashion, rather like computer programmers now study the symmetry of models' faces.  Lawrence would go on to compare Wilson to Antinous and Hercules.  Soon, Wilson was earning 2 guineas a week, making him very well off, considering his previous occupation as a sailor. 

Benjamin Robert Haydon, Wilson's greatest artistic patron, soon took him on for extended periods of time to further study his body and to make the extensive sketches which would inform an entire career.  There can be no doubt Haydon's admiration bordered on the fervent, but his intensive study of Wilson's form is also a delightful commentary on the beauty of the Black physique.  His notes include such gems as 'a perfect model of beauty and activity', a flexibility of the loins 'like whalebone' the fact that he could put his 'foot over his neck' and perhaps the most apposite: 'everything was packed in'. 

Years later, Haydon would wistfully remember how, 'pushed to enthusiasm by the beauty of this man's form, I cast him, drew him and painted him till I had mastered every part.'  He did cast poor Wilson, who, up to his neck in seven bushels of plaster began to suffocate and had to be broken out, but not before Haydon had obtained a perfect cast of his subject's bottom. 

Sadly, Haydon was not so keen on his model's face, who apparently did not meet the standards of antiquity about the lower jaw and there is no record of his face, either by Haydon, or by anyone else, including George Dawe, who painted the image illustrating this post displaying Wilson in his glory.  After 1811, and the 'buffalo' painting, little more is heard of Wilson but his astonishing physique would have continued to bring in work were he minded to pose.

Wilson's fleeting cameo in Georgian London is too short, and much of what it reveals does not reflect favourably upon the attitudes of artists or critics; he was at once beautiful, yet parts of his face and body corresponded to 'the animal'.  Their admiration is often charming in its candour, then tripped up by its pettiness.  In every modern sense, Wilson was an American man who came to London and made a small fortune in a short time: for him, her streets really were paved with gold.  The image his body created, that of the noble savage, would endure to become an icon for abolitionists.  Until the Nubians of the late 19thC harem pictures, his body-type dominated the image of the Black male in British and American art.  The details of Wilson's life may be scant, but we are left with the image of an 'extraordinary fine figure'.

It occurred to me as I was tagging some of the older posts that it might help the mental geography to have a little map with indications of where London's main foreign populations were.  There was a small Arabic population in the City, and a Russian one, but I haven't pinned them down yet, and will add them when I do.

London, like Venice was a trading hub, and throughout the documents of the 18thC, London is compared with her Italian counterpart in all things apart from our 'superior' manner of government (they let 'tradesmen' govern in Venice, can you imagine?).  I am inclined to think that our import and export business was slightly less glamorous than that of the Floating City's, but perhaps familiarity has bred contempt and a fine piece of cheddar was as highly valued in Venice as parmesan cheeses were in London.  

This blog post is a very brief overview of our import and export trade in the mid-18thC and reflects the abundance of foreign goods available in London, and thus throughout England.  I think it is hard to over-estimate the extent to which the ordinary people of London were involved in 'trade' and to the extent they identified themselves as 'tradesmen'.  The expansion of the Empire beneath the Tudor family's reign had opened up parts of the world formerly inaccessible to the English people, and the writers of the 18thC certainly looked back on their medieval forebears as ruder cousins, lacking sophistication and knowledge of the world.  Trade brought not only goods to England's shores, but new ideas, schools of thought and scientific developments; our own advances were also traded as part of the ongoing development of the civilized world.  This air of enthusiasm, excitement and potential is lost to modern London where we are little more than a hub for financial services, and an exporter of bad cars, worse actresses and Newcastle Brown Ale.

England was beaten only by the Dutch for international trade, 'a country not much bigger than Yorkshire, and with a soil naturally barren'.  However, the legacy of the Spanish was a superb navy, and they were 'mighty in traffic'.  The wealth of the Dutch merchants was thrown into sharp relief in 1747 when the government went to them in crisis: they put over six millions pounds (sterling) at the service of the government in less than four hours.  It is almost impossible to put a modern figure to this sum, but it's more than a billion pounds.  In cash.  With those sorts of amounts, it isn't hard to see how the Netherlands convinced the poorer countries of the world, possessed of valuable commodities, to trade with them over any other nation.  Britain had struggled with long and sapping wars, and the countries with which it traded were in decline.  They had one large advantage over the Dutch though: the plantations.  The tobacco, sugar and other byproducts of the American and Caribbean plantations were vital to keeping England, and London, wealthy.

Merchants tended not to deal in one commodity; it was too risky.  Instead, they would deal in the produce of one country, hence Virginia merchants (tobacco and wood), and French merchants (wine and foodstuffs).  England imported wine, sugar, flax, hemp, cotton, rums, copper and iron ore amongst other basic products such as indigo for dyes.  It also imported a large quantity of fish from America, but it was deemed fit only for the Levant.  England exported made-up clothing, furniture, cutlery, haberdashery, clocks, glassware, toys and all manner of 'fancy goods'.  The rule of thumb is that England imported raw products, but exported finished products of a relatively high standard.  The upper-classes of Ireland had a strong 18thC, and were buying heavily from the London markets, but the poor remained very poor, often arriving in England with little more than a strong back and a desire for gin.  Robert Campbell made an acid note of the English attitude to the Irish, 'The balance paid by Ireland in exchange of goods, and the money spent by their gentry and nobility in England, amount to at least one million sterling per annum, which is a greater advantage (relative profit) than we reap from all our other branches of commerce; yet we grudge these people the common privileges of subjects, despite their persons, and condemn their country, as if it was a crime to be born in that kingdom from when we derive the greatest part of our wealth'.

Exports of fancy goods to Denmark and Sweden are recorded, in exchange for woods and minerals, although this trade was apparently dying out by the late 18thC.  To Turkey we sent lead, tin and sugar, and received carpets, coffee, and silks.  Tin and wool were sent to Portugal, and wine, olive oil and ready money were received in return.  To the East Indies, we sent woollen clothes, hats, firearms and silver bullion, but imported gold, diamonds, spices, drugs, tea, porcelain, china, silk, cotton, salt-petre and various other goods.  It was judged a very profitable branch of England's trade, and no wonder.  The less savoury aspects of our history are also recorded in our exports of guns, swords and cutlasses to Guinea, 'in exchange for negroes to work on our plantations, gold dust, and elephants' teeth'.

This is a broad subject for a blog post and does not take into account the 'triangular' nature of the slave trade.  I will tackle it in more detail in future but until then, I quote Campbell again, in what has to be one of the greatest comments on the English relationship with France, ever:

On the 12th of October 1736, on a Jesuit plantation in Cartagena, Columbia a little girl names Mary Sabina was born to the two negro slaves Patrona and Martiniano.

       

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The_Variegated_Damsel_and_The_.zip (1683 KB)

In my previous post on 'On Matters Pertaining to Slavery-' I related Lord Mansfield's role in bringing about the beginning of the end of slavery in Britain, at least as far as the law was concerned, in 1772.  Mansfield was a moderate and educated man, but at his home, Kenwood House in Hampstead was a young person who no doubt influenced his thinking: Dido Elizabeth Belle, his illegitimate, mixed-race grand-niece.

   

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The_little_Black_girl_who_help.zip (365 KB)

In my search for obscure references and bits of information on London immigrants, often from unlikely sources, I came across the story of Whipping Tom, the 'Tall Black Man' of Fleet Street during the late 1670s.  As it turns out, he probably wasn't Black, but dressed all in black and covered his face with a black cloth.  The idea that he was an immigrant is cast into even further improbability by his peculiarly English perversion: spanking.  Yes, Tom would wait in dark alleys for unsuspecting ladies out and about at night, grab them, lift up their skirts and beat 'an Alarum' upon 'their Tobies' with his bare hand as he cried out 'Spanko!'.

The exact date and place of Ignatius Sancho's birth are unknown.  The idea he was born, as his unreliable biographer Jekyll suggests, upon a slave ship in 1729, seems unlikely, but the date is as good as we have.  By 1731, Sancho was in Greenwich, living with three wealthy sisters as a servant (most probably the Legge sisters, who lived opposite Montagu House on Blackheath).  Education was not viewed necessary for Sancho, but this does not mark him out as special at this point in time.  Nor is it by any means certain what his status was, with the sisters, but his degree of freedom seems to make it likely he was a servant rather than a slave.

In order to better understand the nature of 18C London, I am grappling with sources pertaining to the Black population.  Quite frankly, it is a nightmare: the numbers are all over the place, the primary sources are a bit of a mess and the conclusions drawn by well-meaning commentators are often bizarre and tenuous to say the least.