A rare collection of oil portraits of people of color painted by some of Europe’s foremost portrait artists between 1855 and 1894 is on display at historic Fort Frederik in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. The portrait collection officially opens on Monday, December 21, and will be on display until April 30, 2010. Exhibition hours are Monday to Friday, from 9:00am to 4:00pm (and on weekends when there are cruise ships in port).
The exhibition is on loan from Senator Wayne James, who explains, “Very few people have ever seen a 19th-century oil portrait of a black person. In the 1800s, oil portraits were reserved for the wealthy, or were the result of commissions by the wealthy; and because of the economic conditions of most black people in the New World as a result of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, very few black people were of the financial wherewithal to commission portraits. [. . .] in the rare instances where black people were featured in portraiture, they were usually presented in subordinate roles: as servants or attendants, inconspicuously positioned in the background, or incidental to the central figure.”
James selected five portraits from his collection for display: C. Felsing’s “Mulatto from the Danish West Indies” (1855), a meticulously rendered masterpiece featuring a young Crucian girl, her head traditionally wrapped in madras; Franz Xavier Kosler’s “African Beauty in White” (1894), first presented to the people of the Virgin Islands in 2004 at Government House, Christiansted, and oftentimes dubbed “The Black Mona Lisa”; Otto Bache’s “African Gentleman in White Turban” (1866), a portrait believed to have been commissioned by the subject; H.A. Brendekilde’s “Cairo” (1890), which presents a middle-aged Black-Arab, his head monumentally wrapped in white linen; and “Indian Girl” (ca.1860), Robert Kemm’s masterful presentation of an East Indian girl draped in silk, which is a part of the collection because of the post-slavery influence of East Indian peoples in the Caribbean region.
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