'The poor were very much needed because they constituted a crucial counterpoint for the ideal gentleman!'

The Role of Painters | In Promoting the ‘Ideal Gentleman!’

As we had discussed in our past post, Dalrymple’s forte lies in his ‘historical sweep’ that goes hand in hand with his foray into the realm of visual arts. And through this sojourn into the visual, it becomes quite easy and convenient from then on, for the likes of Dalrymple, to authenticate and to augment their own insightful points of view!

This trend of using the visual arts as promo and ammo for their arguments has been of immense help especially to scholars who sought to specialize in postcolonial scholarship per se!

Simon Gikandi, Professor of English with Princeton University, is one such Dalrymple of sorts, who wades deep into the visual arts, to augment and to articulate his own incisive insights and thoughts on slavery.

In his phenomenal text titled, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, Gikandi, using a range of vast past archives, which include portraits and period paintings, diaries and personal narratives, seeks to bring out the reality out there between slavery and the cultures of taste. His argument is that, slavery and cultures of taste are not polar opposites at all. In fact, it is the ugliness of slavery which in actuality, defined and designed theories of taste, notions of beauty, gentlemanliness, and practices of high culture, he avers!

Like Dalrymple then, he opines that colonial wealth reinvented the category of the gentleman!  And here I quote –

As most of the major novels of the eighteenth century illustrate vividly, money, rather than rank, had become the major mediator of social relationships, the authorized agent of regulating behavior. Rather than serving as the immutable marker of class boundaries, taste had become an agent for prying the old class system; the upper ranks now seemed open to people with money and education; the availability of imports, such as East Indian textiles, provided greater choices of dress and furnishings; and, of course, colonial wealth reinvented the category of the gentleman.

Pointing to the Earl of Shaftesbury’s discourse on the aesthetic, Professor Gikandi observes that, the Earl’s discourse promoted the cult of the gentleman as the custodian of taste and in the process seemed to exclude the lower classes from the elevated culture of sensibility, and with a rider at that, that seemed to double up as a double bind!

And well, er… um… that’s exactly how the gentlemanly class got for themselves their elevated status and nobility! Indeed, for the Earl of Shaftesbury then, although the poor were despised and relegated to the margins, they were very much needed in his society, in his scheme of things, because, they constituted a crucial counterpoint for the ideal gentleman. A gentleman, he contended, was a person who held values at odds with ‘the vulgar habits of the people as well as the luxurious living identified with the court’.

In a similar way, representation of the marginalised and the poor in English landscape paintings in the eighteenth century also proved a shocker to Simon Gikandi. There were vested reasons on why the rural poor were not totally excluded from the domain of art! 

Indeed, as John Barrell has noted in The Dark Side of the Landscape, they became essential to the decor ‘of the drawing rooms of the polite’, says Simon Gikandi.

‘How-o-how?’, you seem to ask! 

Well, here, Professor Gikandi gives you and me an answer that proves a real shocker of sorts! Professor says that, ‘the very social classes that were considered to be outside the domain of taste functioned as counterpoints to the ideals of polite behavior or even as figures of desire; that which was outside the manifest framework of the dominant cultural signifiers was essential to their meaning’.

Professor Gikandi then proceeds to give an illustration of one such painting, through the works of Justus Engelhardt Kühn, a German migrant painter who worked in Maryland. This painter Kühn, specialized in paintings intended to enhance the status of ‘affluent colonialists in the developing landed aristocracy’. 

Young Henry Darnall, a wealthy Maryland planter seems to have been idealized to a great extent as a colonial powermaster in one such Kuhn painting. 

Gikandi asserts that, Darnall’s status as a young gentleman was enhanced not only by his elegant and extravagant royal robes and exotic props, including the bird and the bow, but also by the figure of a black boy, considered to be ‘the earliest known depiction of an African-American subject in American painting’.

Thus, the artist’s desire to inscribe his rank, wealth, power and social standing to his powermaster, within the colonial sphere, was fulfilled with gusto, by roping in one pavapetta black boy into the margins on the canvas, thus giving us all an indicator on how colonial-American notions of being and selfhood were established and authenticated!

The black boy then becomes the mark of the American difference, says Professor Gikandi.

To be continued…

image: Justus Engelhardt Kuhn, Henry Darnall III. Circa 1710. Oil on canvas. Maryland Historical Society.