Fitzwilliam Museum's slave trade links explored in exhibition

Jan Jansz Mostaert's Portrait of an African Man, c.1525-30, is described as the earliest individual portrait of a black person in European art

A museum that was founded on profits from the transatlantic slave trade is reflecting on its history in a new exhibition.

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge used the bequest of a man whose grandfather set up the South Sea Company.

Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance was "an important moment in the history of the Fitzwilliam", director Luke Syson said.

It includes works from West Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Europe.

'Pervasive and insidious'

Former Cambridge University student Viscount Richard Fitzwilliam - whom the museum is named after - left a large sum of money and an art collection in his will when he died in 1816, aged 70.

The new exhibition explains how a significant part of Fitzwilliam's wealth and art collection was inherited from his grandfather Matthew Decker.

A depiction of a black man at the height of the transatlantic slave trade is hung next to the portrait of the Fitzwilliam's founder

Decker was a prominent Dutch-born British merchant and financier who in 1700 helped to establish the South Sea Company.

This company obtained exclusive rights to traffic African people to the Spanish colonial Americas.

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"Reflecting on the origins of our museum, the exhibition situates us within an enormous transatlantic story of exploitation and enslavement, one whose legacy is in many ways as pervasive and insidious today as it was in the 17th, 18th or 19th century," said Mr Syson.

"Our exhibition is greatly indebted to the contemporary artists whose work is featured.

"They have looked to the past to imagine a different future.

"By showing their works with significant historical objects, from Cambridge and leading institutions across Britain and elsewhere in Europe, we are rethinking our shared histories to help us consider the ways we can contribute to a better, repaired world, in which principles of equity are enshrined."

'Courage and resistance'

Contemporary black artists whose work is on show include Donald Locke, Barbara Walker, Keith Piper, Alberta Whittle and Jacqueline Bishop.

The museum said that these "challenge and reflect on hidden and untold histories, and reveal acts of courage, resistance, hope and repair".

Jan Jansz Mostaert's Portrait of an African Man, c.1525-30, on a rare loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, is described as the earliest individual portrait of a black person in European art.

Also on display will be Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit, c.1740-80, which is being lent by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery in Exeter.

This is a depiction of a black man at the height of the transatlantic slave trade and is hung next to the portrait of the Fitzwilliam's founder also painted in the 18th century.

Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance will run from 8 September to 7 January.

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