Object Image

Elihu Yale with Members of his Family and an Enslaved Child

This painting depicts the university’s early benefactor and namesake, Elihu Yale (1649–1721). He is seated between his sons-in-law, whose marriages to his daughters Catherine and Anne Yale had been brokered with the vast wealth he had accrued as a merchant and colonial administrator in India. While Yale’s grandchildren play in the background, an enslaved child, whose name is now unknown, serves wine to the men. Over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, many children of African and Indian descent, mostly boys, were separated from their families to serve as attendants in wealthy households in Britain. Often, these children were forced to wear metal collars, like the...
c. 1708
Oil on canvas
201.3 x 235.6cm
B1970.1
Digital image courtesy Yale Center for British Art; free to use under the Center's Image Terms of Use

Where you'll find this

Yale Center for British Art
Permanent collection