In the early days of the pandemic, opera singer Peter Brathwaite was unable to do one of the things he loved to do most: perform.
However, when Getty’s Museum Challenge took off, he joined the fun, festive, and most importantly, communal call to recreate works of art using nothing more than ordinary household items. Brathwaite ended up recreating more than 100 artworks featuring portraits of Black sitters. The new book from Getty Publications, Rediscovering Black Portraiture, features more than 50 of his innovative, bold, and whimsical re-creations.
“Representations of people who look like me in the classical canon have always been of interest,” Brathwaite writes in the book’s introduction, adding that as a Black British opera singer, he is used to being “a rare breed.” These two sentiments merge to produce a fascinating portfolio of artistic re-creations which demonstrate that Black people have always existed in art, that their likenesses are integral to the story of art and art history.
Brathwaite says his initial interest in discovering Black subjects in the classical canon began when a director of an opera asked him to use white face paint to portray an 18th-century French aristocrat.
“That episode with the whiting up was definitely something that made me want to really go out there and find high status black men from that period. And I was determined to do that at that point, in that experience because I just couldn’t understand the insistence that my face should be whitened to fulfill this vision,” Brathwaite said. “I think there is this preconception that if we see images from a certain period, the black subject is definitely enslaved and definitely low status.”
One of the first portraits he found was Don Miguel de Castro: Emissary of Kongo, by Jasper Becx. This portrait was significant because it showed a free, Black man of high status, who was capable of not only operating within elite European society, but of succeeding in it, and climbing its ranks. “The image of the emissary to the Congo really shows that he was someone who was capable of navigating the Western world, the so-called civilized world, and is dressed in the highest fashionable clothes, and has these attendants with him that are impeccably dressed, obviously very intelligent. I think seeing something like that is really powerful,” said Brathwaite.
Throughout the project, he embodied characters with a vast range of societal statures, from Mansa Musa to a kitchen servant in Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus, to the former President of the United States Barack Obama.
“It’s funny, obviously I was thinking about high and low status and those things, but essentially it’s the emotions that seem to be at the fore of stepping into those characters,” said Brathwaite. “And that’s something I feel is sort of universal, whether you are high or low status, the glimpses that we see of these people, these characters, these lives are very much in the moment. And I find really relatable.”
Brathwaite’s work is not only a personal excavation, it is also an invitation to imagine art and art history as both a subject and a practice, a place where we are able to not only see ourselves, but create space for the historically othered, and prioritize stories that have heretofore been forgotten or diminished.
“I think the most important thing for me in that respect was making sure that there was a broad range so that people can understand that Black subjects, people of color from all walks of life have been portrayed in Western art, whether we’ve seen them or not. So it’s very much about debunking myths and stereotypes and asking us to look again,” he said.
