During a visit to a villa in Naples, Italy, Glory Samjolly cajoled her sister and a friend to engage in a witty form of cosplay. Posed regally in a period pastiche of men’s brocade vests, neck ruffs, knee breeches and lavishly embroidered frock coats, they were captured by Samjolly in a group portrait, with a playfully subversive title, “The Honorable Women of Slayage in Their Study.”
For all its pomp and vibrancy, the painting might have gone unnoticed, except that the artist and her other two subjects were Black.
The piece is provocative, but for Samjolly, a 24-year-old figurative artist and self-professed feminist, provocation is the point.
Her paintings were conceived as a retort to the dearth of Black nobles in historical European portraiture, she said from her home in London. It has been and still is “such a rarity to find Afro Europeans who aren’t slaves or shown as servants in the background of a painting, or featured as decoration,” said Samjolly, who studied fine arts at the University of the Arts London. “I asked myself, ‘Hang on, where is the rest of this work?’ ”
Hard pressed to find it, she decided to create her own oil portraits of contemporary artists, business owners, writers and intellectuals in costumes and settings evocative of the European Masters. Some, though not all, are friends willing to sit for Samjolly who paints them in oils against a period background, pressing her floridly ornamental effects onto the canvas through a process called oil transfer. (She sells prints of her paintings through her website.)
Strategically in tune with the times, she soon began scouring the Internet for historical works to serve as inspiration. She posted them on her Instagram account, “Blackaristocratart,” replete with lofty Afro European figures of stature and nobility customarily overlooked by art historians.
“I want to bring to the forefront these characters who were footnotes in history,” she said of her posts, adding: “They are one way of reconstructing the way that Black and ethnic people view themselves.”
Her Instagram gallery — she is planning to find a physical space to house blowups of those images — includes Dmitry Levitzky’s late-1700s portrait of Ivan Gannibal, an eminent military leader and the great-uncle of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, and a portrait of Pushkin himself, who is thought by some scholars to be of African descent.
Alessandro de’ Medici, ruler of Florence in the mid-1500s, appears, as does Dido Elizabeth Belle, daughter of a British naval captain and a slave, who grew up alongside her white cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray, in the lavish surroundings of Kenwood House in Hampstead.
Her Instagram posts, which focus on contemporary figures as well, did not arise in a pop culture vacuum. In “Sanditon,” a Jane Austen adaptation streaming on PBS, Crystal Clarke portrays an Antiguan heiress of mixed descent. The cast of “Bridgerton” is led by Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte, a character based on a historical noble believed to be of mixed heritage. (A planned prequel will focus on Queen Charlotte’s coming-of-age.) And there is “The Gilded Age,” the HBO series, with Denée Benton as Peggy Scott as an aspiring writer whose well-to-do parents live with servants of their own. — NYT
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