The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) has unveiled a rare painting believed to be one of the earliest portrayals of a black individual in English art.
The painting was unveiled on Thursday at the London gallery and features two teenage boys standing side by side, one of African heritage and one Caucasian.
The NPG is leading a major research project bringing together experts in early 17th century portraiture, historians, and conservators to identify the two boys in the 400-year-old painting.
The piece is one of the earliest known examples of a full-length portrait of a black sitter in western art.
Inscriptions say the boys were 13 years old and a further inscription identified the boy on the left as the nephew of King Charles I, Prince Rupert.
Details of his fellow sitter, however, are unknown, as well as how the youths are connected.
The portrait has been at Penshurst Place in Kent since at least 1743 and belongs to Philip Sidney, 2nd Viscount De L’Isle. It will be on loan to the NPG until March 2028.
The painting has no known 17th century links to Penshurst Place, but the gallery believes the sitters may have been connected to the Sidney family through the networks of Sir Thomas Smythe or Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, and thereby to the colonial enterprise of the Virginia Company, a trading company which worked to colonise the eastern coast of North America.
Working with the Sidney family, and with funding from the Idlewild Trust and Historic Houses, the NPG has undertaken technical analysis and treatment of the portrait in its conservation studio.
The portrait will hang in room four of the gallery and “hopes to engage visitors and challenge historical preconceptions of the presence of peoples of African heritage in Europe”.
