Born in around 1690 in Jamaica, Williams is a complex figure. He was a free, educated Black man who challenged restrictions on the rights of emancipated Black people in Jamaica at the height of the enslavement of Africans in the Caribbean. Yet he continued to keep enslaved people on the estates he inherited from his father, who was himself formerly enslaved.
Based on written sources alone, the only piece of evidence we have in Williams' own voice is a Latin ode that he wrote in honour of a British governor of Jamaica . Our perception of him today largely comes through other people, notably the absentee plantation owner and colonial administrator Edward Long, who was a vocal advocate of slavery. Long devoted a derisive chapter of his book The History of Jamaica: or, General Survey of the Ancient and Modern State of that Island, published in 1774, to Williams, whose status as a free Black gentleman and scholar defied Long's racist ideology of the inferiority of Black to white people.
By contrast, the V&A's painting may hold the key to more information about Williams' own negotiation of personhood. This portrait, which came to the V&A from the collection of Edward Long's descendants, is the subject of ongoing research, both historical and scientific, through which we hope to better understand it.
We cannot say definitively who made the portrait, why it may have been created, for whom, or whether it was made in Britain or Jamaica. These open questions create a space for discussion about the painting's purpose and meaning.
With his right hand, he points behind himself to the leather-bound books of his expansive library, including works by Isaac Newton, Locke, Milton, Cowley, Boyle, Sherlock and Rapin, and the architect Andrea Palladio as well as what is most likely Johnson's Dictionary, published in 1755 (providing a date post quem for the portrait). Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, on which the scholar rests his left hand, lies open on the table. The historian Fara Dabhoiwala has identified this as the third edition of the book, which was published in 1726. Through his gesture Williams is therefore cross-referencing his intellectual world and his own place within it.
At this descriptive level, the portrait reflects Williams' biography and his self-perception as a cosmopolitan gentleman scholar with a classical education in subjects including geography, arithmetic, music, astronomy and Latin.
Educated at least partially in England, Williams became a member of Lincoln's Inn (one of the professional associations for barristers) in London on 8 August 1721. According to an anonymous editorial comment in the Supplement to the Gentleman's Magazine 1771, Williams was also admitted to Royal Society meetings, but this scientific organisation denied him full membership 'on account of his complexion'.
A Jamaican landscape can be seen through a window in the top left – providing a counterpoint to the tightly stacked bookshelves. It includes a settlement by a tropical river, thought to be Spanish Town on the Rio Cobre. This view and the terrestrial globe on the floor, turned to show the 'Western or Atlantick Ocean', place Williams in the Caribbean – just as the contents of his library communicate his links to the intellectual circles of London.
Williams returned to Jamaica shortly after the death of his father John in 1723, where it appears that he spent the rest of his life, running a school in Spanish Town, and teaching Black students reading, writing, Latin and mathematics. Here Williams also wrote his ode to the new Governor of Jamaica, George Haldane. The poem, preserved in Long’s book, is representative for the literary culture of his day which placed high value on the creation and consumption of Latin verse on either side of the Atlantic.
Although the painting follows European models of scholarly portraits in its composition and details, its execution – such as the handling of the oil paint and the rendering of perspective – brings into question the identity and training of the artist.
In 2022, infrared reflectography of the portrait carried out by conservation scientists at the V&A in collaboration with the Conservation Department at the Courtauld Institute enabled us to see through most paint layers, identifying changes to the preparatory sketches beneath the painted surface. Most notably, Williams' waistcoat was not originally envisaged to fall over his left leg the way it does now. Faint lines sketch the coat through, and under, the table, indicating that at first the artist drew it as falling straight. In the process of painting, the artist may have miscalculated the available space – or the table with the open book may have become more important as an additional indicator of Williams' status as a scholar and mathematician.
Furthermore, projection lines can be seen under the checkerboard floor which were possibly drawn with a ruler. By continuing these lines, the vanishing point reveals itself to be Williams' face. The artist may have accidentally distorted the proportions of Williams' body when trying to apply perspectival rules.
.jpg)
The portrait was also investigated using x-ray fluorescence (XRF), which detects, and maps chemical elements used in the painting. For example, mercury (shown in pink) is found in the pigment vermilion frequent in the 18th century. But because pigments like vermilion were used throughout the British Empire, this analysis did not help us determine where the picture was painted. The same is true for the employment of Prussian blue (hydrated iron hexacyanoferrate) in Williams' coat and the draped curtain in the top right. Prussian blue was available on both sides of the Atlantic by the 1720s.
.jpg)
We cannot say definitively who made the portrait, and as yet only assume why it may have been created, for whom, and whether it was made in Britain or Jamaica. These open questions create a space for discussion about the painting's purpose and meaning; a debate invigorated by the 2022 scientific analysis and since moved forward by the work of several of the museum’s academic partners. For example, while the art historian David Bindman persuasively argues the painting may be a self-portrait making use of contemporary drawing manuals (an argument possibly borne out by the under drawing discovered in 2022), others like Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire and historian Fara Dabhoiwala have proposed an equally convincing attribution to the British-born painter William Williams (1727 – 27 April 1791).
The artistic ecologies of the Caribbean are beginning to be better understood and are the subject of active art historical research. Further comparative scientific analysis of Francis Williams' portrait, including of its paint layers, will be required in order to locate it within the wider context of Caribbean, British and North American artistic practice during the 1700s, to eventually provide a reliable attribution .
The iconography of Williams' portrait, too, is subject of ever closer analysis: in 2024 Fara Dabhoiwala proposed that the painting celebrates Williams' standing as a mathematician and astronomer who correctly calculated the trajectory of Halley's comet over Jamaica in 1759. Dabhoiwala considers Williams to have played a significant role in determining the composition and details of the portrait, and proposes that the faint light seen in the sky through the window represents the comet's trajectory .
What we can say is that Williams' portrait shows him navigating an identity between two worlds, between Britain and Jamaica. The conversation about Williams' legacy continues.
