The featured image in our recent entry about enslaved Patriot naval pilot Cesar Tarrant isn’t a portrait of Tarrant—at least as far as we know. It’s a striking portrait of an unidentified Black sailor, perhaps activist Paul Cuffe, painted around 1800 and held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Despite not being an image of Tarrant, you’ll find this portrait in just about every online article about him due to the scarcity of images of Black sailors and soldiers of the Revolutionary era.
Just for variety, I almost used a different picture, one called “Portrait of a Black Sailor” that I found in the 1997 book Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. That portrait was dated to around 1790, closer to when Tarrant was piloting warships in the Revolution.
Fortunately, I did a bit more digging and learned that there was a startling story behind that portrait: It was a forgery. In the mid-1970s an art forger apparently decided that an eighteenth-century portrait of an unidentified white sailor would fetch more money at auction if it were of a Black sailor. The forger painted brown skin over white skin and turned an otherwise unremarkable portrait into an historically and financially valuable one. When an art restorer discovered the ruse in 2006, the painting, which had been insured for $300,000, dropped in value overnight to $3,000.
Why does the race of a portrait subject carry such significance? Simply stated, there are far fewer portraits of Black people from that era. Very few Black people could afford to sit for portraits. Poor people of any race rarely turn up in artwork, which means that we are left with a visual archive overwhelmingly made up of very wealthy, white subjects. Forty percent of the population of Virginia was enslaved at the start of the Revolution, but you wouldn’t guess that if your only source was contemporary Virginia portraiture.
So in an encyclopedia entry about a specific Black individual whom the General Assembly voted to emancipate for his service in 1789, I ended up using a portrait of a person from a slightly different era who happens to share his race. I don’t love doing this. There are very interesting conversations going on right now about the possibilities of AI-generated images adding some nuance to the visual archive, although it leaves us with a similar problem regarding accuracy in individual likenesses. But for me, at least for now, I think that an authentic historical portrait shows, if not the subject of our entry, at least the fact that Black sailors existed. I just need to add “art forgers” to the list of things to watch out for in my work.
