Why does Dido look as if she's rushing past her cousin on an errand? For Davies, one possibility is that this started as a single portrait. "He rather hoped things would just go on as they were.'" And while Mansfield was clearly fond of Dido, Poser says there is nothing to suggest she changed his views.īut back to the painting.
In any case, was Lord Mansfield really an opponent of slavery? "He was very reluctant to annoy the slave owners and vested interests," says Norman Poser, author of Lord Mansfield, Justice in the Age of Reason. 'He will be set free, for Lord Mansfield keeps a Black in his house which governs him and the whole family.'" A Jamaica planter being asked what judgment his Ldship would give? 'No doubt,' he answered. He went on to mention the Somerset case: "A few years ago, there was a cause before his Lordship bro't by a Black for recovery of his liberty. He knows he has been reproached for showing fondness for her – I dare say not criminal." Francis Hutchinson, an American living in London, wrote of his visit to Kenwood: "A Black came in after dinner and sat with the ladies and, after coffee, walked with the company in the gardens, one of the young ladies having her arm within the other … He calls her Dido, which I suppose is all the name she has. There were those in Georgian England who argued that Dido influenced her great uncle's decision. "Slavery," he said in his judgment, "is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it." He ruled that a master could not take a slave out of Britain by force, a judgment seen as a key stage in the eventual abolition of the slave trade. "It is not known if Dido was willingly parted from her mother," wrote historian Gene Adams in her 1984 paper Dido Elizabeth Belle: A Black Girl at Kenwood, "but materially speaking, it would certainly have helped both mother and child." According to English Heritage, which runs Kenwood, "her position in the household may have been that of a loved but poor relation and she did not always dine with guests".īut was there more to it than that? Lord Mansfield was Britain's most powerful judge and, as Lord Chief Justice in 1772, he presided over the landmark case of a runaway slave called James Somerset. Dido was sent to England as a child by Lindsay and, from the 1760s, was brought up at Kenwood House by the childless Lord and Lady Mansfield, along with her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray, whose mother had died. She was the illegitimate daughter of Lord Mansfield's nephew, Sir John Lindsay, a navy captain, and Maria Belle, an African woman (possibly a former slave) whom he captured from a Spanish vessel in the Caribbean. What I saw was an opportunity to tell a story that would combine art history and politics."Īnd Dido's life story is an irresistible subject. This painting flipped tradition and everything the 18th century told us about portraiture. She's staring directly out, with a very confident eye. "She was struck still by it, because pretty much all the other portraits on the walls were of white aristocrats – and here was someone who looked like her." Her novel is about a mixed-race girl growing up in a small Kent town in the 1950s, ostracised because of her colour.Īmma Asante, the director of Belle, explains why the painting inspired her film: "You see a biracial girl, a woman of colour, who's depicted slightly higher than her white counterpart. Then suddenly, in 2007, I saw this portrait when it was on temporary display, in an exhibition, Slavery and Justice."ĭavies, who is white, had taken her mixed-race daughter along. "The reason it struck me," says Caitlin Davies, author of Family Likeness, "was that I grew up near Kenwood, so had been in and out of the house for 45 years. Meanwhile, a new biography of her great uncle and benefactor Lord Mansfield sheds more light on her 30 years at Kenwood.
These questions – and the mystery of what she was doing, both at Kenwood and in the painting – feel especially topical since Dido, the daughter of a former slave and a British aristocrat, is now the subject of a film, Belle.
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