Imperial Family Portraits: Gender, Race, and Social Rank in the Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray

The portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray presents them as intimate companions, but formal distinctions construct visual and social difference. The circumstances of the portrait’s production and its cultural meanings are bound up with the representation of Black figures in European art, the history of colonialism, and the commerce in human beings. Painted following the 1772 Somerset case, this paper traces the influences over the portrait’s ultimate form, illuminating contemporary discourses of social rank, gender, and race, liberty and slavery, and family. Ultimately, I argue, the painting provides an important link to Dido as a historical subject and as a subject for portraiture via her unusual gesture, allowing for a speculative recuperation of her agency.