As a Black British opera singer, I am used to being a rare breed – still. Moreover, I am accustomed to having quizzical glances cast in my direction, as if I am something of a novelty or a curious anomaly. A large part of my musical career to date has been based on balancing and reconciling the tricky dichotomy of otherness in relation to myself and the canon of western classical music that I love and love to perform. And given that they are so few and far between, representations of people who look like me in the classical canon have always been of interest. As a student of opera, I clung to the album covers of the African American soprano Leontyne Price and a black-and-white postcard portrait of the Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. These totemic images, my superheroes, became talismanic, protective figures when I found myself on the receiving end of everyday racism from fellow musicians – things like “You’re the whitest Black man I know,”, or “Your performance was so good, I thought you were a white singer blacked up,” or “You would have been a slave when this opera was written.” Or the time a singing coach put her finger in my mouth because she just didn’t understand how I, “a Negro,” could have an alveolar ridge.
In opera, I have been cast as an enslaved African man twice. Both times turned out to be opportunities to humanise Black characters that have all too often existed on the stage as one-dimensional stereotypes. With one of these roles in particular – the enslaved African Kaidamà in Gaetano Donizetti’s Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo, a 19th-century opera set in the Caribbean – there was an urgent need to restore agency to an operatic character who has been portrayed in blackface well into the 21st century. This is a “tradition” that has done much to distort the dignity of Black lives.
When I encountered the Getty museum challenge – to recreate favourite artworks using everyday items found at home during the coronavirus pandemic – I had already experimented with several ways to fill my enforced free time, having seen much of my singing work disappear overnight. Scrolling through social media, my feed was awash with people who had taken up the challenge. The submissions exposed the depressing truth that most of the so-called great artworks we choose to platform and celebrate do not tell the stories of people of colour – the global majority. Here was an opportunity to take a new step in my dignity-restoring mission.
I decided to revisit a search term I’d been compelled to explore at the very start of my opera career: “Black portraiture”. Back then I was looking for evidence to bolster my argument against “whiting up” for an opera production that required me to play the part of a French aristocrat. A message from the creative team had suggested I use a thicker layer of white makeup so as to create a more “uniform stage picture”. I was the only person of colour in the production. Regrettably, I tried it, once. I looked ridiculous. I subsequently trawled the internet, willing “Black portraiture” to find me an 18th-century Black French aristocrat I could show to upturn the narrow view that people of colour from the time were all either enslaved or “savages”. My search yielded a golden find in William Ward’s copy of a portrait of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, by Mather Brown. Bologne was a champion fencer, a lauded classical composer and a virtuoso violinist and conductor in 18th-century Paris. Armed with his likeness, I appeared at rehearsals with proof that the heavy white makeup I’d been asked to wear was not necessary. Here was a free Black man of high status portrayed in his own skin. I ditched the greasepaint and became Bologne in my short scene. The show’s director and designer did not attain the “aesthetic uniformity” of powdered white faces, but I gained a greater sense of belonging and purpose during the performance. I was representing myself authentically as well as charting and acknowledging the diversity of European history.
Fast-forward to the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020. I was “the Negro” who would rediscover Black portraiture and make the Getty museum challenge a matter of representation. By recreating as many Black figures as possible, using the stuff in my house and the camera of my iPhone, I would commit to rescuing their voices from oblivion – and in doing so, challenge how art history has been told.
As a singer, I breathe life into characters. My photographic recreations of artworks draw on this discipline. They are performances. Although the lighting, set, costumes and props are curated, many of the glances and poses happen in the moment. They capture a breath, or a beat, in the action of stepping into these historic paintings. To me, they are living operatic vignettes, each commenting on the scattered fragments – what the poet Derek Walcott called the “cracked heirlooms” – of the African diaspora. It is a process of finding the inherent lyricism within each Black figure I encounter, while at the same time meditating on the past, so I can process what I am seeing and construct a Black narrative on my own terms. As photo recreations on the page or on screen, these performances do not involve my singing voice. But each represents a silent, disruptive howl.
Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali, reworked with cardboard, a bathrobe and a broom
At the centre of a map showing trade routes in the Sahara sits a king with a golden orb, sceptre and crown. This is Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali and perhaps the richest man who ever lived. He developed Tombouctou and Gao into important cultural centers, making Mali a sophisticated seat of learning in the Islamic world. Legend has it that when Musa made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, he brought a caravan of 60,000 people, 12,000 of whom were enslaved. His appearance on the map illustrates how indispensable West African gold had become to the rest of the medieval world. Yet topmost in mind during the making of my re-creation was the complexity of embodying the character of an enslaver.
The magus Balthazar reworked with a bottle of cooking oil and wool
The Three Kings, like the Queen of Sheba, symbolised the global reach of the Catholic church during the medieval period. Today, especially in Europe, it is widely accepted that one of the Magi was a Black king from Africa, but that did not become the norm until the 15th century. His emergence speaks to the presence of Black people in European cities during the mid-1400s, reminding us how the rise of trade with Africa, as well as the trade in African lives, influenced representations in art.
The Sibyl Agrippina reworked with Grandpap’s cou-cou stick, Granny’s patchwork quilt and fairy lights
The Sibyls were oracles, or priestesses, in ancient Greece. One of a series of Sibyls by the Flemish painter Hoecke, this depiction of a Black woman as the “Egyptian” Sibyl follows a tradition in western art, but also speaks to the increased availability of Black models in the Netherlands as a result of the growing trade in enslaved Africans. The figure’s whip and crown of thorns allude to the suffering of Christ at the crucifixion. The inscription on the banner reads Siccabitur ut folium (“He will shrivel like a leaf”). It is likely that this representation would have been understood, in its time, against the backdrop of debates surrounding the Christianisation of enslaved communities.
The Paston Treasure reworked with afro hair products, Jessye Norman and Leontyne Price records
This painting, which is thought to have been commissioned by Sir William Paston, depicts just a fraction of the treasures scooped up during the Paston family’s extensive travels, including tropical fruit, exotic animals, priceless curiosities and a Black man exquisitely clad in velvet and silk. His flesh tones are finely rendered, but is he even really there? His presence is all that visually links this display of wealth to the brutal conditions of chattel slavery. His depiction, to me, represents a process of being dehumanised twice over – first as a piece of property, and then again because this scene is so far removed from his actual reality. My recreation asks what it means to take up space as a Black man.
The Virgin of Guadalupe reworked with tinsel and a rag doll from Barbados
Paintings and sculptures of Black Madonnas are found in Catholic churches across Europe and Latin America, many dating from the medieval period. One controversial theory has it that the figures turned black through centuries of accumulated soot from incense and candles. A more likely possibility is that the Black Madonna is connected to pre-Christian worship of female divinities symbolising fertility. In Mexico, where 17th-century missionaries reframed the Virgin of Guadalupe as a creolised blend of colonial and local iconography, the Black Virgin reflects how Indigenous communities resisted the process of assimilation.
Africa, the Land of Hope and Promise for Negro Peoples of the World reworked with my grandmother’s patchwork quilt
Bisa Butler’s art deals with absent or silenced histories. She extends the ancient tradition of quilting in the Black community by fusing portraiture with collage, using vividly patterned African fabrics. Many of her subjects are anonymous, but here she portrays Emmett J Scott, a Black journalist, educator, author and government official. Scott was Booker T Washington’s chief aide at the Tuskegee Institute, and later became the highest-ranking African American in President Woodrow Wilson’s administration. This re-creation underscores how central the patchwork quilt made by my maternal grandmother, Ina Elrita Brathwaite, has been to the Rediscovering Black Portraiture series. Through it, I am connected to her, to hundreds of years of Barbadian history, and even further back to West Africa. The quilt I inherited has become a visible manifestation of the spirits of departed ancestors. Through these disparate scraps of fabric, they enter the room for remembrance, celebration and blessings.
• This is an edited extract from Rediscovering Black Portraiture by Peter Brathwaite, published on 12 April by Getty Publications. An exhibition of his recreations is at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery from 14 April to 16 July.
