Description

PUBLICATION DETAILS: Lower left:T. Stothard pinx^t.   Lower right: W. Grainger sculp^t. , This is an allegorical etching from Volume 2 of Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies.  6 ½” w x 8” h on sheet 8 ½” w x 10 ½” h.  

EDWARDS: Bryan Edwards (1743-1800) was an English politician and historian born in England, but lived in Jamaica during two periods. Edwards supported the slave trade, which may have influenced the inclusion of this print in his book. In 1793 he published in two volumes the History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies. It was later expanded to five volumes plus an atlas. The last edition (fifth) was issued in 1819.    Edwards includes a poem, “The Sable Venus: An Ode,” by Isaac Teale. The poem compares the Sable Venus to the Venus of Botticelli. The loveliest limbs her form compose, Such as her sister VENUS chose,   In FLORENCE, where she’s seen; Both just alike, except the white, No difference, no – none at night, The beauteous dames between.“

STOTHARD: Thomas Stothard (1755-1834) was a highly prolific artist and book illustrator. It is estimated that he produced five thousand works and, of these, about three thousand were engraved. Botticelli’s fifteenth-century masterpiece “The Birth of Venus” inspired Stothard to create Venus is an African woman (the “Sable Venus”) standing on a half-shell, attended by cherubs and being towed by dolphins to the West Indies.

GRANGER: William Grainger was an 18th century British engraver, active 1784-1793. This image has elicited many impassioned words and speeches. 

ADAMS: The following excerpt about this image is from a presentation by Michael Vannoy Adams, an internationally prominent Jungian psychoanalyst in New York City. On August 15, 2007, he delivered that presentation titled “The Sable Venus on the Middle Passage: Images of the Transatlantic Slave Trade” at the Congress of the International Association for Analytical Psychology in Cape Town, South Africa. If any image is obscene, this is it. It is iconography as pornography. ‘No more preposterous misinterpretation was ever perpetrated of the Middle Passage,’ Hugh Honour says, than the Sable Venus. Honour remarks that neither the poem nor the image ‘so much as alludes to slavery: the theme of both is the physical charm of the black woman. In his remark s that follow, Adams occasionally quotes Daniel P. Manniz. .. Daniel P. Mannix notes that ‘a wealth of classical details’ embellishes the image.  In this image, there is no African goddess, and there are no African gods. The goddess and the gods are all Roman – and although the goddess is black, all the gods are white. The image ‘Romanizes’ and ‘whitens’ the slave trade. There are twelve figures in the image. Eleven of the figures are white – only one of the figures is black. The Sable Venus rides on a scallop shell and sits on a velvet throne. In the sky are six cherubs. Two cherubs fan the Sable Venus with ostrich plumes while one cherub holds peacock feathers. In the sea, two dolphins, with two cherubs, pull the scallop shell, while to the right Triton blows a horn. On the left Cupid draws a bow and aims an arrow at Neptune, who holds not a trident but a flag, the Union Jack. The Sable Venus eyes the reins and holds them as she guides the dolphins, as if the journey from Africa to the Americas were entirely voluntary — as if it were not a journey by force but a journey by choice. “The Sable Venus is virtually nude. ‘Except for bracelets, anklets, and a collar of pearls,’ Mannix says, ‘she wears nothing but a narrow embroidered girdle’.  The obscenity of the image is not the virtual nudity. The perversity of the image is the audacity of the mythological amplification. Roman myth is utterly inappropriate and inapplicable as a parallel to the slave trade. This is not just an incompetent amplification — a comparison for which there is no basis. It is a radically disingenuous amplification. The amplification is a euphemism that represses the enormity of the slave trade and conveniently excuses it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Adams, Michael Vannoy. Extract of a presentation delivered at the Congress of the International Association for Analytical Psychology in Cape Town, August 15, 2007.
Honour, H. (1989). The Image of the Black in Western Art, Cambridge, MA, and London: Oxford University Press, vol. 4, pt. 1.
Mannix, D.P., with Cowley, M. (1962). Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518-1865, New York: Viking Press.
Thomas, H. (1997). The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870. New York: Simon & Schuster.