Art Institute Announces 'Major Acquisition'

COMMENT ON THIS STORY

CHICAGO (STNG)  - The Art Institute of Chicago Wednesday announced a "major acquisition" of a landmark British painting that has not been seen in public for 180 years.

The Captive Slave (1827) by British portraitist John Philip Simpson, was purchased from Ben Elwes Fine Art in London, according to a release Wednesday from the Art Institute.

The Captive Slave "is a heroically-scaled representation of a manacled slave created at an important historical juncture in the history of the abolitionist movement in Great Britain," according to the release. The work has not been seen in public since its exhibition in London and in Liverpool in 1828.

"The Captive Slave is a deeply compelling and historically significant painting," Douglas Druick, Searle Chair of the Department of Medieval to Modern European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, said. "Simpson, an artist known primarily as a portrait painter fully immersed in the official Royal Academy, took a great professional risk in creating a work that expressed his deeply held anti-slavery beliefs."

The painting depicts a black man dressed in deep red-orange, seated against a shallow background composed of browns and grays. The subject, his hands resting on his thighs and his wrists shackled with heavy chains, turns his head and looks upward, out of the frame.

The Captive Slave was first exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1827, when the controversy over slavery in Britain was at its height. That same year the British Parliament declared participation in the slave trade to be punishable by death, setting the stage for the eventual passage of the Slavery Abolition Act six years later, in 1833. The painting was also exhibited in 1828, in Liverpool and again in London. Held in private collections since that time, the work has not been publicly seen in 180 years.

Simpson's model for the painting was the free-born American Ira Aldridge. The painting's debut in 1827 coincided with Aldridge's growing reputation as the first great black Shakespearean actor on the British stage.

The Captive Slave is on view in the Art Institute's Gallery 220. This gallery has been recently refurbished and reinstalled as part of a renovation program at the Art Institute.