The Colossus and the Sphinx - Two Cartographies of Africa in Nineteenth-Century Britain
At a Glance
Section titled “At a Glance”| Metadata | Details |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 2023-07-03 |
| Journal | The Art Bulletin |
| Authors | Ariel Kline |
Abstract
Section titled “Abstract”AbstractThis article compares G. F. Watts’s unfinished portrait of the mining magnate and imperialist Cecil John Rhodes (1898) with the artist’s earlier “portrait” of the Sphinx at Giza (1887). When he invoked this comparison, Rhodes revealed a clash between both men’s cartographies of the British empire. While Rhodes wished to see the entire African continent under British rule “from Cape Town to Cairo,” Watts found in Egypt an orientalist aesthetics that left the artist conflicted about the British empire’s presence there. For Watts, this disjuncture between Orientalism and imperialism elucidated the totality and fragility of the British empire. NotesI am deeply grateful to my dissertation advisor, Bridget Alsdorf. I would also like to thank Christy Anderson, Tim Barringer, Samuel Berlin, Luke Naessens, Steven Nelson, Mary Roberts, Jessica Womack, and the two anonymous peer reviewers for thoughtful editorial feedback. Thanks also to Lina Abushouk, Keren Hammerschlag, Jason Rosenfeld, Nicholas Tromans, and Robert Wellington for their valuable dialogue. Resources for this text were provided by Stacey Clapperton, Jennifer Kimble, Alexandra Olsman, and the Watts Gallery - Artists’ Village, Guildford, Surrey. My thanks to Carolyn Yerkes, Gina Migliaccio-Bilinski, and the Princeton University Department of Art & Archaeology Reproduction and Photography Fee Fund.1 Cecil John Rhodes, interview by Mortimer Menpes, February 22, 1900, interview MS 66, Brenthurst Library, Johannesburg; Rhodes to George Frederic Watts, May 12, 1898, GFW/1/4/61, G. F. Wattts Archive, National Portrait Gallery, London.2 For example, Rhodes complained in 1900 to Menpes that Watts had made him look “too severe.” Perhaps the artist thought that because Rhodes “had done big work & handled miles of country he should be painted full of dignity & look Imperial.” Rhodes, though, would have preferred “the happy young side to show.” It is unclear if Rhodes communicated this to Watts alongside his request for “the eyes of the Sphinx” overlooking his empire. Rhodes seems to have been a difficult sitter to please, and his requests and critiques often contradict one another. Rhodes, interview by Menpes.3 Rhodes to Mary Seton Watts, Madeira, 1898, GFW/1/4/63, G. F. Watts Archive.4 Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life (London: Macmillan, 1912), 2:267.5 M. H. Spielmann, “The Works of Mr. G. F. Watts, RA: With a Complete Catalogue of His Pictures,” Pall Mall Gazette ‘Extra,’ no. 22 (1886): 13.6 Francis B. Nyamnjoh, “Lessons from Rhodes Must Fall,” in #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa, 2016), 187-213. Brenda Schmahmann, “Bringing Cecil out of the closet: Negotiating portraits of Rhodes at two South African Universities,” de arte 46, no. 84 (2011): 7-30.7 Rhodes to Mary Seton Watts.8 Watts, George Frederic Watts, 2:271.9 Khaled Fahmy notes that the “entire rural population of Egypt” tends to fall “under the general rubric of ‘fellahin,’” a slippage of which he remains critical. I use the term throughout this essay to articulate a class of rural peasant laborers who were labeled “fellahin” in nineteenth-century accounts. Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002), 18; Fouad N. Ibrahim and Barbara Ibrahim, Egypt: An Economic Geography (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 8. See Timothy Mitchell, “The Invention and Reinvention of the Egyptian Peasant,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 22, no. 2 (May 1990): 129-50; Gabriel Baer, Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East: Studies in Social History (Abingdon, UK: Frank Cass, 1982).10 Watts, George Frederic Watts, 2:268.11 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).12 Mary Roberts, Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). See also Keren Rosa Hammerschlag, “Christ’s Racial Origins: Finding the Jewish Race in Victorian History Painting,” Art Bulletin 103, no. 1 (2021): 65-88; Nicholas Tromans, ed. The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting (London: Tate, 2008).13 Mary Roberts, “Saidian Time: Orientalism at the Fulcrum of Global Histories of Art,” Journal of the Society for Asian Humanities 52 (January 2021): 158. See also Roberts, “Networked Objects,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 45, no. 3 (2013): 570-73.14 Said, Orientalism, 49-72.15 M. van Wyk Smith, “The Origins of Some Victorian Images of Africa,” English in Africa 6, no. 1 (March 1979): 12. For this model’s contemporary legacies, see Mohamed Hassan Mohamed, “Africanists and Africans of the Maghrib: casualties of Analogy,” Journal of North African Studies 15, no. 3 (2010): 350-351; Ali A. Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986); Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, A Modern Economic History of Africa, vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century (Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA, 1993). Art critics identified this division, and from the late 1990s major exhibitions on Africa began including artists from North Africa. See Steven Nelson, “Africa Remix Remix,” African Arts 41, no. 3 (Autumn 2008): 8n2. For this geographical divide in the art world: see Chika Okeke-Agulu, “Venice and Contemporary African Art,” African Arts 40, no. 3 (Autumn 2007): 5; Salah Hassan, “The Modernist Experience in African Art: Visual Expressions of the Self and Cross-Cultural Aesthetics,” in Reading the Contemporary: African art from Theory to the Marketplace, ed. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: inIVA, 1999), 214-35.16 Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 45-70; Prita Meier, “Authenticity and its Modernist Discontents: The Colonial Encounter and African and Middle Eastern Art History,” Arab Studies Journal 18, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 26-27. See also Tim Barringer, “Fabricating Africa: Livingstone and the Visual Image, 1850-1874,” in David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa, ed. John M. MacKenzie (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1996), 169-200.17 Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 768-96; Selim Deringil, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 2 (April 2003): 311-42.18 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 92-93. See also Ronald Kuykendall, “Hegel and Africa: An Evaluation of the Treatment of Africa in the Philosophy of History,” Journal of Black Studies 23, no. 4 (June 1993): 571-81.19 J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 52-81; W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 5-34; David Blayney Brown, “Mapping and Marking,” in Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, ed. Alison Smith, Brown, and Carol Jacobi, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 2015), 15-17.20 Tim Barringer, “Picturesque Prospects and the Labor of the Enslaved,” in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, ed. Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 41-63.21 Edward S. Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Ronald Rees, “Historical Links between Cartography and Art,” Geographical Review 70, no. 1 (January 1980): 60-78; Stephen Daniels, “Place and the Geographical Imagination,” Geography 77, no. 4 (October 1992): 310-22.22 Barringer, “Picturesque Prospects.” For the relationship between cartography, geography, power, and resistance, see Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).23 E. I. Barrington, “George Frederick Watts, R.A.,” in Illustrated Catalogue of the Loan Collection of Paintings by G. F. Watts, R.A. in the Second West Gallery (May to October, 1885), exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1885), 10.24 Chloe Ward, “England’s Michelangelo in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: The G. F. Watts Exhibition, 1884-1885,” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 14, no. 1 (2016): 68. Following the show’s success, the Metropolitan decided to show the work of “one English artist per year.” Ibid., 69.25 Watts to William Ewart Gladstone, Little Holland House, June 28, 1885, GFW/1/1/18, G. F. Watts Archive.26 There have been exceptions to this portrayal in recent scholarship. Alison Smith masterfully weaves together Watts’s allegorical works and national ambitions. Smith, “Watts and the National Gallery of British Art,” in Representations of G. F. Watts: Art Making in Victorian Culture, ed. Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 153-68. Stephanie Brown writes of Watts’s ambivalence in the same volume. Brown, “Indefinite Expansion: Watts and the Physicality of Sculpture,” in Trodd and Brown, Representations, 83-106. See also David Stewart, “Deconstruction or Reconstruction? The Victorian Paintings of George Frederic Watts,” SECAC Review 12, no. 3 (December 1993): 181-86.27 In a letter to Mrs. Cameron, quoted in Watts, George Frederic Watts, 1:208.28 “Death of Mr. G. F. Watts: A Great Allegorical Artist and Sculptor,” Huntly Express, July 8, 1904. “Death of Mr. G. F. Watts, R.A.,” Aberdeen Daily Journal, July 2, 1904.29 Lara Perry argues that the Hall of Fame series was for Watts “less articulated than their current status suggests.” Drawing on the Lawrence portrait among others, Colin Trodd argues that for Watts “the face is not an indication of the social role of the subject,” but rather “a means of expressing a unique human nature defined by the mind.” Perry, “Nationalizing Watts: The Hall of Fame and the National Portrait Gallery,” in Trodd and Brown, Representations, 122; Trodd, “Illuminating Experience: Watts and the Subject of Portraiture,” in Trodd and Brown, Representations, 139.30 Charles Bruce, John Lawrence,‘Saviour of India’: The Story of his Life (Edinburgh: W. P. Nimmo, Hay, and Mitchell, 1893).31 Watts, quoted in Spielmann, “Works,” 13.32 As Trodd has described it, the Lawrence portrait reveals “a form of blankness or self-haunting,” in which “private identity and public character are blocked by a primal uneasiness or weariness.” Trodd, “Illuminating Experience,” 138.33 “Mr. Watts at the New Gallery,” Westminster Gazette, January 15, 1897; “G. F. Watts at the New Gallery,” The Artist 19 (February 1897): 57; Spielmann, “Works,” 10; Cosmo Monkhouse, “George Frederic Watts, RA,” in British Contemporary Artists (London: William Heinemann, 1899), 22.34 M. de la Sizeranne, “A French View of English Art: Mythic Art - G. F. Watts, RA,” trans. H. M. Poynter, The Artist 19 (April 1897): 150.35 Watts, quoted in Spielmann, “Works,” 15, 6. Earlier in his career, Watts painted works such as The Irish Famine in 1850 and Found Drowned in 1848-50. This article is concerned with his later works, and as such maintains a focus on Watts’s more allegorical pictures. For an overview on how the portraits fit within Watts’s career see Barbara Bryant, “G. F. Watts and the Potential of Portraiture,” in G. F. Watts Portraits: Fame and Beauty in Victorian Society (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2004).36 Ward, “England’s Michelangelo,” 64; R. E. D. Sketchley, Watts (London: Methuen, 1904), 3.37 Quoted in Watts, George Frederic Watts, 1:90.38 George Frederic Watts, “The National Position of Art (1889)” in George Frederic Watts, ed. Mary Seton Watts, vol. 3, His Writings, 271; Trodd, “Illuminating Experience,” 142.39 Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 49. See also Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).40 Alison Smith, “National Gallery,” 155.41 Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 52. Sylvia Wynter’s notion of Man1 and Man2 is also relevant here. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation - An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 257-337.42 Watts, George Frederic Watts, 2:267.43 Rhodes to George Frederic Watts.44 Ibid. Dorothy Tennant, Lady Stanley, a mutual friend, helped to organize the sitting, although she noted in a letter to Watts that Rhodes did not have “a grand face.” Not as grand, it seemed, as her husband, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who as she notes in her letter “founded the Congo Free State 900.000 square miles and offered it to England” and “through his efforts England now owns British East Africa.” Stanley was perhaps angling for a portrait of her husband, which Watts never painted. Stanley to Watts, London, May 10, 1898, GFW/1/4/60a, G. F. Watts Archive.45 Watts, George Frederic Watts, 2:267-68.46 Paul Maylam, The Cult of Rhodes: Remembering an Imperialist in Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 2005), 2-3.47 D. Chanaiwa, “African Initiatives and Resistance in Southern Africa,” in General History of Africa, ed. A. Adu Boahen, vol. 7, Africa under Colonial Domination, 1880-1935 (Paris: UNESCO, 1985), 205. For more on Rhodes and King Lobengula, see Arthur Keppel-Jones, Rhodes and Rhodesia: The White Conquest of Zimbabwe, 1884-1902 (Kingston, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983); Björd Lindgren, “Power, Education, and Identity in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe: the Fate of King Lobengula and Matabeleland,” African Sociological Review 6, no. 1 (2002): 51; Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Re-Thinking the Colonial Encounter in Zimbabwe in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Southern African Studies 33, no. 1 (March 2007): 173-91; Angie Todd, “A Chronicle of Land,” Black Scholar 37, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 20; and Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher, and Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism, 2nd ed. (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1981), 236-37.48 W. T. Stead, “Character Sketch: Cecil Rhodes, of Africa,” Review of Reviews 20 (July-December 1899): 461. The phrase “From Cape Town to Cairo,” has long been associated with Rhodes. Just a few examples in the British press include: “Daily Notes,” Echo, March 8, 1894; “An Uncrowned King: Statesman, Diamond King, Millionaire - A Remarkable Career,” Evening News, November 17, 1894; “From Cape Town to Cairo,” Daily Telegraph & Courier, October 11, 1898. For Rhodes and Stead, see Joseph O. Baylen, “W. T. Stead’s History of the Mystery and the Jameson Raid,” Journal of British Studies 4, no. 1 (November 1964): 104-32; A. J. Wilson, An Open Letter to Mr. W. T. Stead on his Friendship for Cecil J. Rhodes (London: J. Paterson, 1902). Red is the color associated with Britain and its military exploits.49 “The Rhodes Colossus: Striding from Cape Town to Cairo,” Punch, or the London Charivari, December 10, 1892, 266-67; “The Right Hon. Cecil J. Rhodes,” Illustrated London News, April 5, 1902; John A. Buttery, “The Colossus of Africa: For Weal or Woe,” Sheffield Daily Telegraph, July 25, 1900. The Colossus of Rhodes was a large-scale sculpture built in 280 bce, often reported to have straddled the city’s harbor before it was toppled by an earthquake fifty-four years after its creation.50 Arguing that this statue was a symptom of the University’s curricular and ethical failures related to its colonial legacy, student activists called for—and saw—its removal in 2015. Nyamnjoh, “Rhodes Must Fall”; Schmahmann, “Bringing Cecil Out.”51 One illustration for Song of the English is of a Sphinx, apparently situated on the banks of the Thames in modern London. Rudyard Kipling, A Song of the English, illustrated by W. Heath Robinson (1909; repr., London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1912) [104], [5].52 The romantic notion of Rhodes’s unrealized desire is in his For example, Rhodes has with to See Hon. Cecil that he not to see his of Empire See Rhodes,” Huntly Express, Mr. were the to See Evening Telegraph, A. “The Jameson Raid,” Historical Journal 6, no. 3 Rhodes apparently from his portrait with Watts a face from for long a had to or but that Rhodes for Watts after had his Cecil Rhodes (London: University Press, he had an and from a Rhodes often he was not in his His for “the under British See in The and of Cecil John Rhodes: With to are Some the and of the ed. W. T. Stead (London: of on Rhodes. did to that he was a “Mr. Cecil Rhodes,” The Watts, George Frederic Watts, It is difficult to how of this Watts to Ibid., Rhodes’s of of in John Cecil Rhodes (Boston: Little, Brown, Watts, George Frederic Watts, George Frederic Watts, 4, ed. Mary Seton Watts, 5, and 25, Watts Gallery - Artists’ Village, Guildford, This that “the would have been by the but for Ibid., George Frederic Watts, Race as in Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts, Watts, 4, Ibid., See Tim work on the in the Modern (New York: George Frederic Watts, 4, and 1, ed. Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts, Race as and 5, ed. Mary Seton Watts, 22, Watts, Race as A of this be found in 4, Watts, 5, Watts, 1, R. E. “G. F. Watts’s Sculpture,” no. (December Watts, George Frederic Watts, Stephanie Brown, G. F. Watts, and UK: Watts Gallery, 2007), am are deeply by the of and for he was a and perhaps to I would in an full of as Watts to April 5, G. F. Watts Letter from George Frederic Watts to Mary October 1885, G. F. Watts Watts, George Frederic Watts, be the modern in Egypt that had been the See Arab The and Culture of in Late Ottoman Egypt Princeton University Press, Watts, George Frederic Watts, Ibid., Egypt was as to be of See and and the of the There is for the that a by is the text that and the The from to trans. and David (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, of Mary Seton Watts, January 3, The Watts Watts, George Frederic Watts, Watts a of the Society for the of the of Egypt in trans. David History of a University Press, 2002), When the Egyptian Art of the exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), The Sphinx also empire’s in the British See “The Great Sphinx and in Colonial of Africa,” Victorian and Culture no. 1 (Spring notes that this from be Sphinx, Watts, George Frederic Watts, Ibid., “The of the Great Gazette, January 7, “The Egyptian Illustrated London News, June Watts, George Frederic Watts, For in this see The of in Journal of in Africa no. on with to the of South Africa,” - African Journal of 3, no. 2 This in the of the by the which the are and the he were by a with and the The in the of his in the See M. as of the of and Zimbabwe: and (2010): Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, The on and Press, Heritage Zimbabwe: 2005), R. in South Africa (London: A to the Black for in Africa, the and vol. 2, NC: For earlier of see South of A Journal of History 5, no. 1 Rhodes’s quoted in Rhodes, and Joseph that the of the of Cecil John Rhodes in the National in The and their in and ed. and Paul (London: 2002), Cecil Rhodes, trans. repr., New York: Macmillan, The is in by Cecil Rhodes: The and his (London: John Rhodes, and It is a Sphinx that the of The a after Rhodes The is a for Rhodes. Roberts, The Colossus: A Story of (New York: & 1899), of years a the the from one to the John “England’s in Contemporary Review (December The French a in who that his were “the of the by which were described in “a that The trans. (London: and work is in the John to be made in England before a to A for in of the of the Egypt and the and the the of the the ed. (London: John See also in and Modern With on its (London: Macmillan, John of the National in Nineteenth Century (January F. to Fellah (London: Ibid., See B. in Modern The (October Some the built the Mr. on November Daily News, May be the were of to and See J. and History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern vol. 2, and The of Modern University Press, For the use of see R. Ali or Ali An in the of a Middle Eastern Studies no. 4 (October 1985): In the Mehmed Ali had built his from the See Fahmy, All the Pasha’s John to July 5, quoted in History of the English of Egypt: a of 2nd ed. (London: T. See also Empire: Resistance and British (London: Books, masterfully between and British that the British were from in the of and History of the Ottoman Empire, Britain was the of the Ottoman Empire the of Ibid., For more on Ottoman see R. I. Colonialism and in the Middle East: Social and Origins of Princeton University Press, G. Colonial and the of University Press, in Modern S. H. Modern of the A Study of the and of the of Egypt (London: Hodder and Stoughton, See also S. The of Egypt: Social and With to (London: George G. “The New Egypt: with Mr. February See also The The class to an Egyptian that on See “The of the in Modern Egyptian Journal of the American in Egypt For Egyptian see Arab The of in Arab in the Twentieth to Princeton University Press, The was “the Egyptian by and as one American and was from it as the by the and of his See de The or the of New (New York: and The Egyptian The and (London: and See also W. “A in Robert Brown, The of the a of the and of the (London: E. A. The for in Egypt (London: and Charles W. the The