Painting of Dido Elizabeth Belle and her cousin Elizabeth Murray.

 
1. – Credit Line

Title: Painting of Dido Elizabeth Belle and her cousin Elizabeth Murray.
Artist: it was formerly attributed to Johan Joseph Zoffany (13 March 1733 – 11 November 1810) though is currently thought to be painted in the Zoffany style by David Martin (1 April 1737 – 30 December 1797).
Year: Completed in 1779.
Type: Portrait
Period: The painting is painted in late baroque - early neoclasical style.
Size and medium: I couldn’t find the painting measures.
Painting technique used: The tecnique used is oil on canvas.
Museum/gallery: The painting is housed at Scone Palace in Perth, Scotland (http://scone-palace.co.uk/). In 2007, it was exhibited in Kenwood, together with more information about Belle, during an exhibition marking the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act 1807.

2. – Description of the Painting


In the background there is a natural landscape full of trees and an open sky. We can find a bridge and a building.

The portrait depicts two young upper-class ladies having fun in the garden. On the right-hand side, we can see Lady Elizabeth Murray with a pretty pink and white gown with lace in the collar and sleeves.

She has put flowers on her head and her face while smiles daintily. Around her neck she wears a pearl necklace and in her left hand she holds a book. With her other hand she is reaching to her cousing Dido, who is in the left-hand side of the picture.

Dido wears a silver gown that is made in the same fine silks as Elizabeth. Dido’s otherness is romanticized by the addition of the turban and basket of exotic fruit. She is also pointing at her check and around her neck she has a pearl necklace like her cousin and earrings (pearls too).

These two slender figures, clad in sumptuous clothing and wearing pearls round their necks, would be utterly typical for the period. Except for the fact that one of them is black.

3. – Formal Analysis

The colours are warm and cold. The portrait has plenty of silver, greens and blues, but also of pinks and yellows. Most of them are bright and vivid, but the painter used pale and soft shades to make contrasts between the background and the foreground.

The lines are curved and diagonal. The painter wanted depict movement so he painted the figures slightly forward.

The perspective is achieved using the one-point linear perspective. We can see that in the bottom left-hand corner, where the city and river are drawn.

The painter use his technique to create the ilusion of texture. The cousin’s gown are a good exaple. We can see the difference in the materials between them.

4. – Interpretation

There’s a lot to say about this portrait. What is truly interesting though, about the painting, is its iconic meaning and the fascinating figure of Dido.

Elizabeth has flowers in her hair to show youth and pearls to depicts both wealthy and purity.

Dido wears a turban and basket of exotic fruit to show her exotic nature. And why is Dido pointing at her cheek? Is it meant to draw attention to her skin colour, or simply to her smile and her dimples? Might it even be, as a new theory suggests, an allusion to the Hindu deity Krishna?

Elizabeth reaches for her as a sign of love and caring and though Dido might be seen more in a secondground the truth is that she is also highlighted by the painter because of the lack of background around her figure (there is only the sky).

The amazing thing about Dido Elizabeth Belle is not that she was mixed-race. Who knows how many white men’s children were born to black slave women in the 18th century? It’s not even that her father was a wealthy English aristocrat, there were plenty of titled captains tearing around the Caribbean at that time, capturing French and Dutch schooners during the Seven Years’ War and making off with their sugar, coffee and other (often human) cargo. The extraordinary thing about Dido Belle is that her father, a 24-year-old Navy officer called John Lindsay, took her home to England and asked his extended family to raise her. And they did.

Belle grew up in north London. It was the palatial weekend retreat of Lindsay’s uncle, the first Earl of Mansfield. Dido Belle was raised and educated alongside the other highborn daughters of the household, and remained a favorite of the Earl and her father well into her thirties, after which an advantageous marriage was arranged.

Her position in the Earl’s household supervising the poultry yards was typical for any lady of high birth at the time, but her job overseeing the lord’s correspondence was usually a task reserved for a highly educated male clerk or scribe and is evidence of her importance and elevated rank. She received an allowance of £30 per year, more than any except the heiress herself and a sum unheard of at the time for any illegitimate daughter.

She was treated like the rest of the family, when it was just the family. Where it got awkward is when they had guests in. The black, illegitimate daughter of a nobleman occupied a peculiar, between-stairs rank; too well-born to belong to the serving classes but too different to be wholly welcome in high society. When the Mansfields were entertaining, Belle didn’t eat with their guests.

Upon Lord Mansfield’s death in 1788, Belle was furnished with a £500 lump sum in addition to a £100 annuity, as well as a suitable marriage to John Davinier, with whom she had three children. In Mansfield’s will, her status as a free person was carefully confirmed, since many would have been all too happy to divest her of her fortune.

In 1772, when Dido was 11, he ruled that it was illegal for a British owner to forcibly take his slave abroad as “property”. Thomas Hutchinson wrote that slave owners believed Lord Mansfield was determined to set slaves free because “he keeps a Black in his house which governs him and the whole family”.

Nine years later, he ruled on one of the darkest episodes in Britain’s colonial history. The crew of the Zong slave ship threw more than 100 African slaves overboard in order to claim insurance for “jettisoned cargo”. But in a blow to the slave traders, Lord Mansfield threw out the claim. “Slavery,” he said in his judgment, “is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it.”


The case provided fuel for the anti-abolitionist cause, which succeeded in ending Britain’s slave trade in 1807. It was abolished in 1833.



For centuries, black people were basically accessories in paintings, there to express the status of the white people. They were never looking out at the painter but up in awe at the white protagonist.


What’s remarkable is that Dido is painted at the same height as Elizabeth Murray, and Elizabeth Murray is shown reaching out to her. But what’s most unusual is her direct gaze.  

This painting scandalised many of it’s 18th century audience due to its portrayal of Belle, a woman of colour, in a non-subservient position. Considered to be the first painting to do so, it was probably commissioned by Belle’s father Admiral Sir John Lindsay in the late 1770’s.