‘Where did Dido get those Clothes?’ - Lawrence Scott

Dido Belle was the great niece of Lord Mansfield and cousin of Elizabeth Murray. They resided at Kenwood House, London.
Lawrence Scott’s talk, subtitled ‘Undressing and Redressing Art and History against a Background of 17th and 18th Century Black Portraiture,’ examines the double portrait of the cousins Dido Belle and Elizabeth Murray, two of the most well-known inhabitants of Kenwood House.
This Friends of Kenwood Sunday lecture centres on an analysis of the double portrait by David Martin (Scone Palace) and compares it to other 17th and 18th century portraits. It also considers portraits by artists hung at Kenwood, whose portraits elsewhere depict black figures.
Lawrence Scott FRSL is a prize-winning novelist from Trinidad & Tobago. His new novel, Dangerous Freedom, (2021) is based on the life and times of Dido Elizabeth Belle.
Introduction & fade-out music: ‘Iphigénie en Tauride’ by Gluck, composed 1778-79, the same years as the double portrait is dated to. Radical for its time, displacement, confusion and the sea feature amongst other themes in this innovative opera taken from the Greek drama by Euripides.
Produced by Friends of Kenwood
www.friendsofkenwood.org.uk

[@robertrauschenberg1854]

Fascinating talk - can't wait to see Kenwood and read the novel!

[@sharonkaczorowski8690]

Thank you…finally a video which doesn’t require me to write a long educational post about the reality of slavery and Dido’s position. I’m 71 and have spent most of my life studying the human need to look down upon and abuse other human beings as a means to assert superiority, as well as satisfy human greed…the three are interrelated. I’ve also studied the condition of “bastard” children in these same societies. People can be opposed to slavery and still look down upon people of African descent. I agree that the context of these paintings should exist next to them. I once had a similar argument with the curator of Native American objects…one was a woman’s dress filled with bullet holes surrounded by blood stains, certainly from a massacre. I returned the next day to find the dress taken down and the curator nowhere to be found. I felt both very angry and grief stricken. My grandmother was Chickasaw…her presence in my life along with vicious violent acts I saw as a child under Jim Crow informed my life’s studies. If we do not learn and describe the context of history, we are doomed.

[@sharonkaczorowski8690]

It is interesting she was not able to marry until her Lord died…raised my eyebrows.

[@sharonkaczorowski8690]

Last comment…to me the bad pulls Dido back, restrains her.

[@sharonkaczorowski8690]

I prefer the term pseudo-scientific race studies.