约翰·辛普森认领

This life-size study of a model’s head and shoulders evokes a tradition of heroic and divine imagery stretching back to antiquity. The far-off gaze would conventionally suggest philosophical reflection or moral aspiration, while the heavy red cloak billows out like the costume of a saint in seventeenth-century religious art.

In 1827, when the English portrait painter John Simpson exhibited this heroic image of a manacled man, he was making a bold statement. The slave trade was still a controversial moral and political issue, and it would not be fully resolved in England until six years later, when Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act. With Captive Slave, Simpson dared to take on this contentious subject. As the model for his “slave,” the artist posed Ira Aldridge, the free-born son of a lay preacher in New York, who would go on to have an important career on the London stage. Here Aldridge’s expressive upward gaze conveys a yearning for freedom in an image that both speaks to the historical moment and transcends it.