Beauty's Tribute (Elizabeth Cooper)

In a lush garden with glimpses of a house and fountain beyond, a kneeling boy—whose identity as African or Asian remains unclear—presents a girl with a bunch of grapes. This mezzotint is based on a late seventeenth-century painting by Sir Peter Lely of Elizabeth Cooper, daughter of an eminent London print publisher. Whereas engravings after painted portraits usually retained the name of the sitter, Faithorne’s print shows how portraits could also be recast as generic images for a wider public audience.

Te composition closely follows Lely’s earlier portrait of Lady Charlotte Fitzroy; it replicates the kneeling boy while altering the girl’s features. A title and four lines of verse have been added that shift the emphasis away from Cooper’s specific likeness towards a generalized depiction of “beauty”:

Beauty commands Submission as it’s due,

Nor is’t the Slave alone that owns this true.

Much fairer Youths shall this just Tribute pay,

one Fate deplore, but thankfully obey.

While the image explicitly contrasts the girl’s whiteness with the boy’s darker skin, the verse suggests that all (enslaved and free, black and white) will willingly submit to a natural order in which “beauty”—implied here to be European and white—reigns supreme.

Gallery label for Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain (Yale Center for British Art, 2014-10-02 - 2014-12-14)

Credit Line: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection