Witnessing Slavery

Witnessing Slavery is a timely and original investigation into the role of the eyewitness account in the representation of slavery in British and European art.

Gathering together over 160 paintings, watercolours, drawings, and prints, this book offers an unprecedented examination of the shifting iconography of slavery between 1760 and 1840. In addition to considering how the work of artists such as Agostino Brunias, James Hakewill, and Augustus Earle responded to abolitionist politics, Sarah Thomas examines the importance of the eyewitness account in endowing visual representations of transatlantic slavery with veracity.

“Being there,” indeed, became significant not only because of the empirical opportunities to document slave life it afforded but also because the imagery of the eyewitness was more credible than sketches and paintings created by the “armchair traveller” at home. Full of original insights that cast a new light on these highly charged images, this volume reconsiders how slavery was depicted within a historical context in which truth was a deeply contested subject.

Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.