21 July, 1766 REVEREND SIR,
It would be an insult on your humanity (or perhaps look like it) to apologize for the liberty I am taking. – I am one of those people whom the vulgar and illiberal call ‘Negurs.’ – The first part of my life was rather unlucky, as I was placed in a family who judged ignorance the best and only security for obedience – A little reading and writing I got by unwearied application. – The latter part of my life has been – thro’ God’s blessing, truly fortunate, having spent it in the service of one of the best families in the kingdom. – My chief pleasure has been books. – Philanthropy I adore. – How very much, good Sir, am I (amongst millions) indebted to you for the character of your amiable uncle Toby! – I declare, I would walk ten miles in the dog days, to shake hands with the honest corporal. – Your Sermons have touch’d me to the heart, and I hope have amended it, which brings me to the point. – In your tenth discourse, page seventy‐eight, in the second volume – is this very affecting passage – ‘Consider how great a part of our species – in all ages down to this – have been trod under the feet of cruel and capricious tyrants, who would neither hear their cries, nor pity their distresses. – Consider slavery – what it is – how bitter a draught – and how many millions are made to drink it!’ – Of all my favorite authors, not one has drawn a tear in favour of my miserable black brethren – excepting yourself, and the humane author of Sir George Ellison. – I think you will forgive me; – I am sure you will applaud me for beseeching you to give one half hour’s attention to slavery, as it is at this day practised in our West Indies. – That subject, handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many – but if only of one – Gracious God! – what a feast to a benevolent heart! – and, sure I am, you are an epicurean in acts of charity. – You, who are universally read, and as universally admired – you could not fail – Dear Sir, think in me you behold the uplifted hands of thousands of my brother Moors. – Grief (you pathetically observe) is eloquent; – figure to yourself their attitudes; – hear their supplicating addresses! – alas! – you cannot refuse. – Humanity must comply – in which hope I beg permission to subscribe myself,
Reverend, Sir, &c.
I. SANCHO
Coxwould near York July 27. 1766
There is a strange coincidence, Sancho, in the little events (as well as in the great ones) of this world: for I had been writing a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro‐girl, and my eyes had scarse done smarting with it, when your Letter of recommendation in behalf of so many of her brethren and sisters, came to me – but why her brethren? – or your’s, Sancho! any more than mine? It is by the finest tints, and most insensible gradations, that nature descends from the fairest face about St James’s to the sootiest complexion in africa: at which tint of these, is it, that the ties of blood are to cease? and how many shades must we descend lower still in the scale, ’ere Mercy is to vanish with them? – but ’tis no uncommon thing, my good Sancho, for one half of the world to use the other half of it like brutes, & then endeavour to make ’em so. for my own part, I never look Westward (when I am in a pensive mood at least) but I think of the burdens which our Brothers and Sisters are there carrying – & could I ease their shoulders from one ounce of ’em, I declare I would set out this hour upon a pilgrimage to Mecca for their sakes – wch by the by, Sancho, exceeds your walk of ten miles, in about the same proportion, that a Visit of Humanity, should one, of mere form – however if you meant my Uncle Toby, more – he is yr Debter,
If I can weave the Tale I have wrote into the Work I’m abt – tis at the service of the afflicted – and a much greater matter; for in serious truth, it casts a sad Shade upon the World, That so great a part of it, are and have been so long bound in chains of darkness & in Chains of Misery; & I cannot but both respect & felicitate You, that by so much laudable diligence you have broke the one – & by falling into the hands of so good and merciful a family, Providence has rescued You from the other.
And so, good hearted Sancho! adieu! & believe me, I will not forget yr Letter.
Yrs
L. Sterne
IIB6 Manuel Amat y Junyent, Viceroy of Peru (1707–82) Letter on ‘Casta’ paintings
Before the appearance of mechanical reproduction, ‘fine art’, along with its many other social functions, was an important mode of documentation. Until the advent of globalization, however, eighteenth‐century Latin American ‘Casta’ painting remained a footnote in art history, a provincial variant of academic competence deemed to be of little aesthetic or historical interest. But with the twofold change in focus associated with globalization (that is, a felt imperative to ‘broaden’ the Western canon on the one hand, coupled on the other with an equally broadened interest in subject matter) the use of academic art to address issues of ethnic difference became charged with renewed significance. Casta painting was an ethnographically oriented derivative of European academic art which became a way of documenting the hybrid – and stratified – populations of Latin America. The historian Kelly Donahue‐Wallace writes of Casta painting, ‘at its core rested the desire to picture heterogeneous societies, which were largely unknown to Western audiences before Spain’s arrival in the Americas. The paintings also represented a society that accorded privileges and rights … by race, and was therefore motivated to identify and maintain racial distinctions’ (Donahue‐Wallace, Art and Architecture, p. 217). Artists included Juan Rodríguez Juárez (1675–1746) and Miguel Cabrera (1695–1768), both of whom painted series of family groups demonstrating different racial admixtures, usually with a caption spelling out what those admixtures were: ‘mestizo’, ‘mulatto’, etc. The present short text is a letter of 1770 from the Viceroy of Peru to Julián de Arriaga, a representative of King Charles III of Spain. This accompanied a shipment of 20 such paintings destined for the Cabinet of Natural History belonging to the king’s son. The extract is taken from Kelly Donahue‐Wallace, Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America, 1521–1821, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008, p. 221.
Your Excellency,
Ardently desiring to contribute to the formation of the Cabinet of Natural History which His Most Serene Prince of Asturias has begun, what I offer will contribute but little to his enlightenment but is one of the principal examples of the rare products found in these parts, the notable mutation of appearance, figure, and color that results from the successive generations of the mixture of Indians and Blacks, which are usually accompanied proportionally by inclinations and properties. With this idea, I ordered copied and sent twenty canvases, described in the accompanying registry; and I will continue urging the completion of these combinations until they are finished, if it is that this humble product of my humility finds some acceptance by Our Prince and Lord by way of Your Excellency’s hand. For better understanding, the order of the descendents are graduated by numbers; it should serve as key that the son or daughter of the first couple is, according to his or her sex, father or mother in the next; and that of the next couple in the third, and so on until the end of those which are now copied.
May God preserve Your Excellency for many years.
Lima 13 May 1770 … Sr D. Manuel de Amat
IIB7 Ignatius Sancho (1729–80) Letter to Jack Wingrave
This second letter by Sancho has a sharper edge than his letter to Sterne. Composed over a decade later for the son of a friend working for