Erica Moiah James 
I am Erica Moiah James, an art historian, curator and associate professor at the 
University of Miami. I was previously the founding director and chief curator of 
the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas when it was founded in July of 2003. 
Over the next five episodes, I will discuss Portrait of a Young Woman and reflect 
on what it means to search for the name of a historical individual in the archive. 
What tools might I, as a contemporary art historian, use to uncover the possible 
history and life of the woman who remains unnamed? In this process, I'm using 
the traditional methods of art history to think about how art history as a 
discipline has historically and structurally made it both difficult to name 
unnamed figures of color within historical portraiture, and also has used 
representations of Blackness such as this as evidence for claims to deny the 
presence and vitality of Black life in the early modern world.

I do not know if I will ever find this particular woman in the archive, but in my 
search, I make a claim that this work is both necessary and that it begins to do 
reparative justice within a discipline that has all too frequently settled for 
assuming absence in the archive instead of doing the essential historical work to 
illuminate Black lives.

In this episode, I will talk with Oliver Wunsch about the particular technique of 
pastel, which is critical to this work. Oliver is an expert in 18th century pastels 
and works as an associate professor of art history at Boston College. We talk 
about the possible artist who made this pastel through an attention to the 
materials and technique. But we also think about why this is important for 
possibly naming the woman pictured in this portrait.

Portrait of a Young Woman is a pastel rendered in an incredibly sensitive, 
detailed, and perhaps even loving manner. It suggests that it was completed by a 
pastel artist not only in possession of a great deal of skill, but someone who 
would've been recognized as one of the best talents of the medium during the 
18th century. The number of artists capable of carrying this designation was 
limited at the time.

SLAM had previously attributed the work to Jean-Étienne Liotard, a Swiss born 
pastelist of the period, who had made his way around Europe in the 18th century
drawing portraits commissioned by the wealthy. However, his style is too sharpedged and precise, and often lacks the sensitivity exhibited in the SLAM portrait, making it less likely that it came from Liotard's hand.

Rosalba Carriera, a Venetian, a Rococo painter, and pastelist was also an authorial 
candidate. Her style is softer than Liotard’s, and she is known to have included 
portraits of what is referred to as “Black types” in her work. However, Carriera's 
portraits tended towards allegory. In addition, she rarely traveled beyond Italy, 
and even at the height of her career, her work does not evidence the kind of 
human value and detailed figural study the portrait possesses. Furthermore, 
because of cataracts and their poor treatment, she was unable to draw and paint 
for the last decades of life, which precede the presumed date of the portrait by 
several decades. 

An argument can also be made for the Parisian Jean-Baptiste Perronneau,
one of the most famous pastelists of the 18th century. He traveled quite 
extensively in France, Holland, Italy, and Russia before dying in Amsterdam in 
1783. But Perronneau, like Liotard, worked on parchment and vellum rather than 
paper. The portrait’s matrix and the personality depth and layers of material the 
portrait possesses cannot be found in his work.

Though I have wavered many times, of all the known pastelists working in Europe 
at the time, following Rothlisberger and Loche, I argue that the portrait is the 
work of the Frenchman Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Perronneau’s rival. First, I 
can say that its composition, three quarter pose, shallow background, the 
manner of shadow, the use of the pastel medium, the employment of tonal 
variations of robin egg blue, and its lack of a signature aligns with de La Tour's 
practice. But there is more… De La Tour had a special skill for capturing the 
personality and natural resemblance of his sitters and an unsurpassed ability to 
render true to life textures in pastel. He is also known to have developed a 
unique technique to fix the pastel paper to preserve and protect the work. And 
the exquisite condition of the more than 250-year-old portrait suggests that this 
method may have been applied. He is also known to have featured at least one 
Black person as subject in his oeuvre, namely his studies for and painting of 
Jeune Noir rattachant le bouton de sa chemise, exhibited at the 1741 Paris Salon. 
This work and the SLAM portrait both suggest that his overall approach to this 
work did not change, no matter who sat before him. 

De La Tour first completed numerous studies of his sitters, talking to them as they 
worked to get a sense of their inner life and personality, partly because he 
believed it helped him create a more accurate representation of them. Every 
material and formal aspect of Portrait of a Young Woman points to his hand. The 
matrix was recently scanned in 2019, indicating that the paper is Dutch blue 
paper and based on the watermark made by the Evert van Oorspronk paper mill 
in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, a mill that began production around 1751 and ceased 
for a time in 1777. It is known that De La Tour only used Dutch blue paper, unlike 
Perronneau and Liotard. There is only one known work on parchment or vellum. 
He also used a hardier, rough surface paper, not insignificantly referred to as 
“sugar wrapping paper,” rather than the smoother quality used for writing. For 
him, the rougher paper held the pastel better, and his layered technique required 
that quality. As indicated, unlike Liotard and Perronneau, he never signed his 
pastels, and while not a definitive marker of authorship, this fact does make 
attribution of his work more difficult. Rather than style or mark, Neil Jeffares 
posits that his works could only be determined by “their sheer perfection.” And
while I am less romantic in matters like this, I have to say that Jeffares is not 
entirely wrong.

Unlike Liotard and Perronneau’s, de La Tour’s style was not what Jeffares 
describes as “the rapid attack.” His search for perfection included reworking 
certain areas in ways not seen on the non-invasive imaging done on, say, works 
by Liotard or Perronneau. Their application on vellum and parchment leave little 
traces of notable reworking of the figure, and their use of pastel was actually 
very thin rather than layered. They used just enough to get the job done. De La 
Tour was the complete opposite. His distinctive studies exhibit greater emphasis 
on the face, which in turn translated to the final works. His focus on the face 
often demonstrated looser hatching and strokes in the areas around his subject. 
His use of preliminary sketches is singular, but through them, one witnesses a 
finely determined process and a degree of labor he exerted in the final paintings 
of his subjects.

De La Tour labored over his work, famously overworking portraits later in life in 
his quest for perfection. Using infrared photographic techniques, Cecile 
Gombaud has shown that de La Tour used “a black, wet, carbon-based medium, 
possibly applied with a brush” to complete the under drawing and delineate
features around the eyes and mouth of his sitter. He also had a special way of 
using quick lines and sketches on the face of his sitters, usually the cheeks to 
register a point of shading or a facial plane or contouring that needed to be 
remembered when working in the absence of the sitter. SLAM’s scans of the 
portrait demonstrate all of these techniques. In addition to the water mark, it 
reveals the black wet carbon underpainting, areas he reworked, sculpted, and 
expanded or toned down. His technique meant too that he didn't conserve the 
amount of pastel he used. De La Tour used what he felt necessary to do the job, 
and that determination lends itself to a luminosity of flesh in his works that is 
singular.

In process, he often ground down the watermarks and train marks of the paper 
maker, making them invisible to the naked eye. The layered surface of the sitter's 
cheek gives you a sense of how his layering added to the sense of naturalism that 
was paramount during the period. He often focused on the soft tissues and the 
eyes to achieve extraordinary sense of skin texture. This, along with careful 
attention to rendering the light in his sitter's eyes and at times a slight smile, had 
the effect of making it seem that the person pictured has been caught in the 
midst of a moment, right? A kind of mobile transient moment, like a snapshot, 
giving some of his work a quintessentially modern character.

In discussing the importance of resemblance in de La Tour's work, Jeffares notes 
that, “during the 18th century, a fundamental requirement of all portraiture was 
resemblance. Theories of aesthetics, all equated beauty with verisimilitude, the 
perfect imitation of nature, which would make the same impression on viewers 
as the subject depicted would have done.” Jeffares was not of the opinion that 
de La Tour was very good at resemblance. He posits that everyone looked similar 
and that his poses were also “boringly uniform.” I don't agree entirely, but I do 
observe a sense of uniformity in the work, not wholly in terms of final 
resemblance, but in technique, down to the very stroke, as de La Tour rendered 
certain signature features. Using his self-portrait as an example in comparison to 
the young woman, the similarity in stroke used in these two very different 
portraits is remarkable. He clearly developed a technique and deployed it with 
necessary adjustments, depending on the sitter. 

De La Tour suffered from myopia and therefore worked within two to three feet 
of his subjects. More than achieving the resemblance that was so central to the 
period, he's described as possessing a unique ability to capture his sitter's 
intelligence. Adrian Bury suggests that de La Tour was interested in capturing the 
individuality of his sitters, as evidenced in a letter to Belle van Zuylen on April 
14th, 1770, where he wrote that, “pictures should be characterized by a touch, a 
technique, a style, which should differentiate them from one another as strongly 
as their subjects differ in nature.”

His ability to capture a smile has also been discussed too, as indicative of how he 
was able to portray the “subtlety of mind” in women specifically. These are 
profound statements to consider in relation to this 18th century portrait of a 
Black woman. The degree of regard given indicates that he was in personal 
contact with the sitter, that it is unmounted, relatively small, suggests that it may 
not have been a formal commission, that the sitter encountered de La Tour in the 
company of others, and he, for unknown personal reasons, felt moved to paint 
her. 

In 1812, 24 years after de La Tour's death, the remaining portraits in his studio 
was sold upon the death of his brother. The SLAM portrait may have been in a 
trove, but I'm not yet certain. Museum records show its acquisition from the 
originally French-based Wildenstein Gallery's London location in 1951. They had 
acquired it from a sale at Christie's London, where it had been placed on 
consignment by Giuseppe Ceci known later as Joseph Ceci, an extremely 
important yet shadowy figure in British art and museum history at the time.
But what does naming de La Tour as a portraitist tell us about the figure? It not 
only increases the likelihood that she was a real person and not a type, but it also 
suggests that in the 18th century to have encountered de La Tour, she was more 
than likely from French-occupied Africa or the French Caribbean. Since de La Tour
rarely left France, much like Marcus Fitzroy Thomas, she would've been brought 
to Europe from Africa or the Caribbean, perhaps as a free woman of color, 
though more likely as an enslaved handmaiden or nanny to a white French family 
that once resided in these locales. During the period, Black women and girls in 
colonial plantation societies tasked with children often enough returned to 
Europe with their employers in charge.

If one settles on de La Tour as author, the question remains: how, when, and 
where did he encounter her? In France, in Holland, in England? What 
circumstances would've brought her into his line of sight long enough to paint 
her? As suggested earlier, it is most likely that she arrived in the company of a 
person of prominence with ties to the Caribbean. Considering the formal nature 
of the portrait and its details, I combed through the records of de La Tour’s 
known sitters with ties to the Caribbean and came up with four possibilities in a 
world that revealed itself to be shockingly small and interconnected. A case can 
be made for several of these figures. But in the interest of time, I can say that 
right now the most likely connection between the unknown young woman and 
de La Tour is Madame de Charrière, better known as the writer, Belle van Zuylen,
who I cited earlier. 

This madame was from an extremely wealthy Dutch family. She first met de La
Tour in 1753 in Paris through mutual friends. She was only 13 years old, but 
found their conversations fascinating, marking the beginning of what would 
become a remarkable friendship. They became so close that at times she would 
playfully sign some of her publications “Abby de La Tour.” De La Tour took a 
lengthy trip to Holland in 1766 where he visited with Belle's family for a time. At 
that point, he painted his first known portrait of her, and they began a lengthy 
period of correspondence. In 1771, she arrived in Paris with her staff for a long, 
18th century style honeymoon where she met with de La Tour again. She also 
began taking classes from him and sat once more for her portrait. Between 1766 
and 1771, he's known to have completed several portraits of her, destroying a 
few in his elusive search for perfection.

What is interesting to me is that the odd echo Jeffares observes in de La Tour's 
work featuring women is also apparent in Belle's portrait and the SLAM's 
portrait, though individuated. But what makes Belle the most likely bridge 
candidate at this time between de La Tour and our sitter isn't just her association 
with the artist and the similarity in the composition and execution of the works, 
but her timing and relationship to the Caribbean. Half of Belle's wealth came 
from a family stake in the Dutch West India Company, the Dutch East India 
Company, and the South Sea Company. She benefited from transatlantic slavery 
and in her letters, her early letters and writings, she seemed ambivalent about 
the institution. But within five years of inheriting her West and East India and 
South Sea Company stock, she sold 70% of the holdings. Not all, but most now, 
describing the institution of slavery as a vile practice, which she nevertheless 
needed to keep a toe in in order to live with the unusual degree of freedom she 
claimed during the period that her wealth allowed. 

In addition, unlike de La Tour, Belle traveled quite a bit, often accompanied by 
her favorite brother and servants. I found an intriguing record of her arriving in 
England on November 7th, 1766, shortly after de La Tour’s visit with her family. 
In the passenger records, she's accompanied by her brother and household staff. 
What is interesting is that when her Dutch staff is mentioned in records, they are 
always referred to by their full names. But on arrival in England, she and her 
brother are granted that honor, but her servants are referred to using one name 
each in the manner of the enslaved: a male by the name of Caliste, and a young 
woman named Doortje or Dorothea in English, which funnily enough means gift 
of God in Dutch. May Doortje be our young girl? Who knows? But the work will 
continue.

I wanted to hear you talk a little bit about this art form, about pastel art in this 
period. I know you’re a specialist on this, and to me, in just examining the archive 
on this and the different practitioners, it seemed like a very democratic medium. 
There are lots of women that are experts at it. It also seemed to satisfy the 
hunger, maybe that's a modern hunger for portraiture. Maybe that too, because 
it was quicker. But I like this idea in looking at your work, this idea of 
impermanence and permanence. And I wanted to know whether you would 
speak to that as well, because it's pastel on paper. It's not oil and it's not canvas, 
so there's a quality in the process and matrix that makes it a little vulnerable? I 
don't know. Or a little bit delicate in a way. It doesn't have the same expected 
longevity, let's say, as an oil on canvas. But when you look at this portrait, oh my 
gosh, she was so lovingly preserved. It was precious to somebody. I mean it's 
really well done. I mean, they have done a good job as well. But, you know, that's 
long. But those are the kinds of ideas I want us to talk about and to hear from 
you about that. That's a lot, but yeah… 

Oliver Wunsch
That's great. Well, should we dive in?

Erica Moiah James
Yes.

Oliver Wunsch
First of all, thanks so much for having me. I'm delighted to talk with you about 
pastel and about this portrait in particular. And I can say a little bit about what 
pastel is. I don't know if you've covered that in the podcast so far: what some of 
its advantages were and what some of its drawbacks were. Sometimes those two 
things are hard to disentangle. A vulnerability can also be a strength. 

In terms of what pastel is, just on a basic level, it's powdered pigment mixed with 
a binder and a filler. So, the pigment is the same pigment that you would find in 
oil paint or watercolor. So, the binder is this glue that holds it together, generally 
a glue with somewhat weak adhesive properties because you want the pastel to 
be soft to apply to the paper smoothly, so something like gum arabic is often 
used as the binder. And then the filler is something like clay or sometimes chalk, 
which is added to give the pastel as a specific texture or to vary the opacity of the 
material. And then it's usually applied to paper and often that paper is mounted 
to a stretched canvas. 

In terms of its advantages, you already mentioned one, the speed of execution is 
a big, big advantage, a big draw for pastel because it allows you to work directly 
on the support. You don't need to mix your colors on a palette beforehand. You 
combine the colors right there on the paper and then you don't need to wait for 
layers of paint to dry. So, you can work very quickly, and that's obviously an 
advantage in the context of portraiture, where you don't want to hire your model 
and people get impatient holding a pose. It allows you to capture more fleeting 
expressions, like if you want your model to hold a smile or some other ineffable 
expression. If you can work quickly, you're in a better position to capture that 
impermanent expression. So, we're already talking about one type of 
impermanence, the impermanence of the depicted subject, that kind of 
evanescent sense of the soul of the person who's represented. But then along 
with that, there's this other kind of impermanence, which is the potential 
impermanence of the medium.

And now we're getting into some of the shortcomings of the medium. There are 
a few different ways pastel is vulnerable to damage. Like all works on paper, it's 
light sensitive. It's also susceptible to vulnerabilities related to humidity, so it can 
develop mold if it's kept in a humid environment. But the biggest vulnerability is 
its vulnerability to vibration. So, any kind of impact threatens to detach the 
powdered pigment from the support because there's nothing holding the pastel 
to the paper except for the mechanical grip of the particles of the pastel to the 
tooth of the paper. And so, things like even vibrations from passing street traffic 
nearby can slowly weaken the adhesion of the pastel to the support.

Erica Moiah James
I have never thought of that. I have never… Wow. Wow.

Oliver Wunsch 
It's actually—it’s a real issue in museums today, even when we think about the 
types of activities that happen within museums. As a lot of museums try to 
broaden their audiences through having various events taking place with live 
music, for instance, or even museums holding dance parties. These are things 
that pastel curators and conservators have to worry about because that 
thumping bass going in the museum lobby can actually be weakening the 
adhesion of the pastel to the paper. 

Erica Moiah James
Wow. Who knew? I did not know. Wow. Wow.

Oliver Wunsch
So, one of the interesting things to me about pastel is how this material that has 
a very uncertain claim on posterity, a very tenuous grip on the future is taken up 
by portraitists, who historically had been tasked with recording the lives of 
people for future generations. I mean, one of the fundamental obligations of the 
portraitist, if you go back and look at theoretical writings on portraiture going 
back to the Renaissance, is the duty to record a lasting likeness for future 
generations. And so, it's a bit odd to think of this material that is so vulnerable to 
be taken up in great numbers in the 18th century among portraitists. But I think 
that gets at some of what you said you were interested in discussing about the 
hunger for portraiture in the 18th century, because I think that demand for 
portraiture is a different kind of demand than existed in an earlier period. 
Because prior to the 18th century, of course, there was still portraiture, but it 
was more focused around royal and aristocratic patronage and portraits were 
often made for the context of a palace or a family estate. And the idea was that 
these would be family heirlooms, these would be passed along from one 
generation to the next. 

But in the 18th century, you get this rising middle-class, merchants, financiers, 
professionals, philosophers, all sorts of people are now interested in sitting for 
portraits and the function of those portraits changes. It's not just about passing 
along your likeness to the next generation. It's also about keeping up with 
fashion, keeping up appearances, and your portrait is displayed in more varied 
contexts. It's not necessarily part of a palace or a family estate, it might go on 
display in a public exhibition, or it might be something that you hang in the 
sitting room of your home. And it's about signaling something of your social 
ambitions at that particular moment in time. And so, once portraiture gets 
caught up in the logic of fashion, then the idea that it has to endure for all of 
history becomes less the priority. And so, I think that allows for a medium like 
pastel to come to dominate this genre that had historically been associated with 
endurance. 

Erica Moiah James
That's fascinating. That's fascinating. Continue. I mean, continue. So, I think 
you're signaling some of the things I sensed, right? That there was this sort of 
democratization of this genre and this medium helped, but also the sort of
economic culture and social culture of the period also heavily influenced this. 
More people could afford, I imagine, to pay artists to do this work. There was 
more signaling, you know, of status. I think maybe status, the idea of status, was 
probably in flux in the 18th century, simply because of economic rearrangements 
and people being able to ascend through class.
So, I find all of this fascinating. And also, here we have the opportunity for very 
wealthy people to have their servants painted. You know, it's incredible. And I 
think the work that I'm doing here meets in that nexus. It’s only possible actually, 
I would say, in that scenario you just described, that ecosystem that you just 
described.

Oliver Wunsch
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. 

Yeah. Another thing I would say about status and portraiture in the 18th century, 
staying with pastel, is that once social status becomes associated with 
fashionability, then a novel, an unproven medium like pastel can really take off 
because then suddenly novelty, which is at the heart of fashion, becomes 
desirable in and of itself. So being a risk taker, someone who's willing to spend 
money on a portrait that may not last, in fact, becomes a way of signaling your 
kind of risk tolerance and your willingness to experiment with the new thing.

Erica Moiah James 
Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating because even as the art market is taking shape, in a 
way, pastel goes against some of the traditional markers of value, even in the art 
market. They're singular, but they're on paper, they're not permanent, you know, 
they're not sculpture. There is that risk, and that is very not what the market, the 
growing market is about. But it seems to take off simply because of fashion. It 
was the fashionable way to be represented and all the other things that it could 
do.

Oliver Wunsch
And if you think about the older forms of status objects, like even oil paintings, 
oil portraits, one of the ways those objects had historically acquired status was 
through patina, through the pleasing appearance of age that develops on an 
object as it's held within a family and handed down generation after generation.
Pastel operates according to a completely inverted set of principles and values. 
On a technical level, pastel doesn't allow for patina to accrue to it because it 
doesn't have that polished surface of an oil painting. So, if it's properly 
preserved, it maintains its freshness. And in addition, it is a medium that is 
appealing to a market that is not so concerned with showing this object has been 
in my family for many generations. It's a market that is starting to place value on 
novelty in and of itself. And so, the newness of the object rather than the oldness 
of the object becomes part of what people are attracted to.

Erica Moiah James
Another quality that I noticed in the portrait, and I assume it's because of the 
medium and maybe the paper as well, is this sort of…the haptic. So, there's 
something about pastel in that paper that, for lack of a better term, seems more 
human or I don't know, fleshy. It approximates the qualities of the flesh and your 
desire to touch something. It has the softness of a baby's skin where you want to 
just pinch their cheeks or something like that. 

Oliver Wunsch
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree, and I'm glad you brought that up because that is one 
of the advantages of the medium that I wanted to mention. It produces these 
really distinctive textures and surface effects. The funny thing about a pastel is 
that it is both luminous and matte at the same time. And that comes from the 
way that light interacts with the particles on the surface of a pastel. Because light 
can penetrate the surface and then it refracts among the different pastel 
particles. So instead of producing a reflection, like an oil painting will produce 
reflections as light bounces off of its surface, and then you get that kind of sheen, 
that glossy sheen. Instead of that, with pastel, the light goes into the surface of 
the pastel, refracts in a bunch of different directions, and then comes back out as 
a kind of glow that isn't in a single beam. It's producing a sheen, but instead it is 
luminous. It’s as if the light is emanating from within the surface of the work and 
that produces that flesh-like appearance without that glossy sheen that we see 
on things. 

Erica Moiah James 
Yes. So, who were the best? Who were the people, who were the artists that, you 
know, really shone and really came to the fore during this period?

Oliver Wunsch
Yeah, so in 18th century France, the person who initially brings the medium to 
great prominence in France is actually a Venetian artist, Rosalba Carriera. And
she comes to Paris in 1720, shows to French audiences the range of possibilities 
that exist within this medium. She leaves in 1721, but the medium is then rapidly 
taken up by a bunch of different artists.

The most prominent among them is Maurice Quentin de La Tour, and La Tour was 
the most sought-after French pastelist throughout much of the 18th century. He 
dominates within Paris so much so that many of his competitors, really 
accomplished competitors like Jean-Baptist Perronneau or Liotard, they often 
find that it's better for them to leave Paris and have this itinerant existence in 
order to find other markets where they can develop a clientele. So, the Paris 
pastel market is dominated especially by La Tour, but I wouldn't want to give you 
the sense that he's the only really active pastelist from Paris. And this gets at the 
issue that I know you're concerned with. The issue of attribution and figuring 
out, can we say who made this pastel? Because there are these big names like La 
Tour, like Liotard, like Perronneau, but because pastel was such a popular 
medium in the 18th century, we know that even just in Paris or at any given time 
from the mid-18th century on, you're probably talking about somewhere 
between 200 and 300, maybe even 400 active professional pastelists. Now, 
they're not all amazing artists, so not all of them could necessarily produce the 
portrait that you're studying here. But we're at least looking at dozens of 
possibilities of artists who were in the right place at the right time, who had the 
ability to produce a work like this.

I think when works like this enter museum collections or when they're put up for 
auction, the people in charge of creating the auction listing or entering it into a 
museum database, obviously have an interest in tying the work to one of the 
most notable examples, a recognizable name. But it's not necessarily the most 
reliable piece of attributing at work, just by reaching for the names that come 
first to mind.

Erica Moiah James 
Yeah. And of course that's what I would do as a non, you know this, I'm not a 
specialist in this period. I'm a contemporary—well, we all are—we’re 
contemporary art historians working on the past. And I think there are things 
that we have to be mindful of. I tend to work on modern and cont—what I call 
modern and contemporary art—which is a wide field, but I find that this work, 
this project in particular, requires something more from me, you know? And it's 
requiring a different sort of sleuthing, different questions, a different knowledge 
base, really. And you're pointing some of them out to me right now. 
So, naturally I think I would go with the familiar first, right? Before sort of 
excavating, doing the sort of necessary excavation, and I've really sort of followed 
SLAM, the St. Louis Art Museum’s directive. But also questioning it, because I just 
don't believe it's a Liotard. There's nothing about it really that tells me that it's 
him. So, I know it's someone other than him. But of course, I'm going to go with 
de La Tour, and Perronneau all of the ones that you mentioned, Le Brun, all of the 
big names. Yes. But chances are you're correct. It could be one of the 200, right? 
Or maybe not, maybe someone, you know, it's just out there. So, there's a lot of 
sleuthing involved here, but I find it fascinating. I think it's, I don't know, there's
something about this kind of art history that requires archival work, but also 
technical art history as well that I find really, I don't know, I'm invigorated by the 
process, by the research process and the methodology of it all that you have to 
almost develop as you go.

Oliver Wunsch
Definitely. I mean, the process of attributing a work to a particular artist is both 
fascinating and maddening because there are so many ways the process can go 
wrong.

Erica Moiah James 
Yes. And how long? I mean, honestly, I think I was, I spent like days trying to find 
a watermark. Like where this watermark is. Weeks probably. It was just crazy. I'm 
like, why am I doing this and why do I feel I have to do this? I'm here back in my 
office with tracing paper, trying to figure out, you know, what all of these letters 
mean and, oh, it was something! But yeah.

Oliver Wunsch
That's a good question. So, when you asked yourself why are you doing it, I know 
one of the things you wanted to talk about today was what do we gain from 
attaching the name of an artist to this work, and then also the name of a 
subject?

Erica Moiah James 
Yes. 

Oliver Wunsch
So, when you asked yourself, why am I doing this? What was your answer? Why 
is it important to know the name of the artist?

Erica Moiah James 
Yeah. Well, for me, the artist almost gets me closer to the sitter in a way, because 
there are other paths that open up. I can look at their records, I can look, you 
know, I can follow their travels, I can see whether there is a moment where he 
intersects with, like I've read all of the literature on de La Tour’s clients, for 
instance. Who sat for him, where they sat, you know, and it's opened up an 
entire world, right? So, I'm not necessarily thinking of the portrait as an object 
over here, I am thinking about the portrait and I want to imagine if within a kind 
of cultural space, where this person once existed. And how, considering all that 
you said, how did this become possible? How did this portrait of this young Black 
girl even become possible in that kind of space? So, finding out who the maker is 
sort of leads me. It thickens the web. But there's something about the portrait 
itself that has compelled me to know, right? 

And we were talking to an archivist earlier today who helped identify the figure 
of Marcus in the Yale Stanhope portrait of Stanhope. And so, we were having 
that conversation with her and what was really strange when I was researching 
this portrait was how small this world was, right? How, yes, they're in Paris, but 
then the Brits are traveling to Paris, and the Dutch are traveling to Paris too, and 
they're all traveling, you know, they're moving around, and they have their 
servants, and they have their holdings in the Caribbean. There’s this really 
interesting world that opens up that de La Tour, and Liotard, and all of these 
pastelists are playing a really interesting role in, and yeah. So, the search has 
opened up a world, a sort of creative space for me, a social space, a political 
space, an economic space that allows me to almost think of the architecture 
where this portrait then becomes possible. So just as a researcher, I find that 
fascinating and maybe just you and I would find it fascinating? I don’t know. But I 
find that, I mean, even though it's around the portrait, all of that seems to inform 
it, you know what I mean? In some way and makes it possible. So, I'm fascinated 
by it all.

Oliver Wunsch
Definitely. And I mean, I don't think it's just the two of us would be interested. 
Everybody loves a good mystery. And I think it makes sense when you say that 
you're interested in determining the artist in part because you're interested in 
knowing who the sitter is because I think sometimes art historians become 
obsessed with determining the authorship of a particular work for less 
interesting reasons. Like, well, a lot of money is at stake, you know, if you are 
able to attribute a work to one artist versus another, it could radically transform 
the market value of it. And then there's also just the sense of a kind of ineffable 
aura that goes along with like a Van Gogh.

Erica Moiah James 
Well, the curator at SLAM admits that this is why they have the portrait, right? 
Just as you mentioned, it was attributed to Lyotard, they wanted to have a 
Lyotard. It was up for auction at Christie's. Let's get it. You know?
Yeah, we understand that. But for me, it's about the knowing, and the 
knowledge, and what can be gained.

Oliver Wunsch
And the subject. 

Erica Moiah James 
Yeah, exactly.

Oliver Wunsch
Who the sitter is.

Erica Moiah James 
Yeah.

Oliver Wunsch
And so, and then the other question that I remember you mentioning when you 
first reached out to me about having this conversation was, what is it that we 
gain if we actually are able to figure out who she is?

Erica Moiah James 
For me, there's a personal aspect to this, right? There's a personal aspect to it, 
that I have to register, you know? As a Black person from the Caribbean, who, 
you know, I'm a part of a diaspora where there aren't very many images that I 
can go back to. In the talk I talked about how I'm fortunate I have a photo of a 
great grandparent, right? But most people don't, you know? And also, she looks 
like my sister! My older sister at that age, right? And that's what I was like, wow. 
She looks like us, right? And so that drew me in. 

But what compels me, I think, is to open up our vision of the world in that period, 
right? I think I am an academic, I'm a scholar, who is just really interested in 
questioning, and questioning what we think we know. You know? And always 
sort of working within that space of not considering something settled at all 
times, that we're always in process of gaining and learning and we should 
continue to question. And I think that the research and the portrait allows me to 
not only pursue knowing who she is, but pursue understanding the world in 
which she can be a part of, that she was a part of, right? And so, there's a 
personal side of it, but then as an art historian and as a human being all of that 
sort of intersects. 

But also, it's a question of archive for me as well, because in terms of doing this 
research and coming up with a methodology to engage her, I had to think of 
alternative archives. So, I've been doing research on her head tie, on the 
materials, the fashion. I had a great conversation with Amelia Rauser on her 
work. So, all of this, which to me, Oliver, is just fascinating! I think it's incredible 
and I want other people to know, you know? I want to sort of deliver this 
information to the public to say, “look, this is another way of seeing this world.”
And it's a way of seeing it through her. You know, usually we get the official sort 
of histories, but the portrait in a sense is allowing her a sort of strange speech 
that we don't necessarily get in the archive. And so, for me, being able to think 
about the Caribbean outside of traditional archives, while in conversation with 
real archives that are still useful, I think for the last few years has been a 
tendency to question what is or what it's not, or that nothing is there, we need 
to fabulate or make it up. I'm a little reticent to give that up because I know what 
is constantly being revealed in these archives and that we haven't, in a sense, 
how can I say it? Put the right lenses on the information that's there and that 
there's more to give and she's allowing me to, in a sense, develop a methodology 
that shows that there are alternative archives that we can use, but there's still 
something in the “traditional archives” that can also help. And we need to sort of 
expand what we understand as archive in order to, in a sense, get a sense of this 
period, which we can only approximate as historians, right? We weren't there. 
We have to, yeah, we have to sort of go with where these various archives take 
us. And I've approached, in part, the image itself as a kind of archive, as the first 
archive. And thinking about portraiture, just think of the wealth of what you just 
said and shared about the material and the symbolism, portraiture, what that 
meant within the cultural climate of that time. And someone could come in and 
do so a Marxian or do a feminist reading of what you just said and open things 
up even more. And I think that's the beauty of the work that we do. And yeah, 
which gets me really excited.

Oliver Wunsch
That makes a lot of sense. I mean I like what you said about how we can 
recognize the limits of what's in our known archival sources without giving up on 
archival research altogether. And all of what you were just talking about in terms 
of your process for trying to identify this woman, like looking at the fabrics, the 
clothing, the accessories, that all strikes me as really valuable and much more 
interesting than the kind of casual attempts to identify her that I have seen in the 
much older writing. I think some of the perils of attributing a work of art to an 
artist actually happen again in the efforts to identify the sitter of a portrait. Like I 
noticed that going way back in some of the material about this portrait, there 
were these references to, “oh, she looks like Phyllis Wheatley.” And it seems like 
a version of what happens when a collector or a curator says “it's a Lyotard, or 
it's a Van Gogh,” just like reaching for a familiar name without providing an 
argument for what the evidence is and just narrowing the world to only the 
names that pop into your mind.

Erica Moiah James 
Yeah. Yeah, I'm glad you brought it up because this portrait has been used to 
represent so many things, especially in the digital age that we live in. It's a past a 
little side thing; I follow it. And it's shown as essence, like her essence, what they 
think she represents, is used in really interesting ways. So, she can represent, 
well, they thought she was Belle, associated with the chief justices of the slave 
ship, Zong, the chief justice that oversees his grandniece. They thought she could 
be her. But I've seen her image sort of deployed all over the internet to represent 
everything that she is not, right? And in a way, I want to push against that as 
well. You know, there's something, especially in this contemporary moment 
where images are so fugitive, your image could illustrate and represent someone 
that you never met halfway around the world. It could just be pulled. And so, I 
think I want to tie her to things, tie her to a history and sort of in an effort to 
reclaim a kind of humanity, and that may seem sort of corny, but yeah. To attach 
the body to a human being. To attach representation to a human being that, 
especially for Black people, increasingly seems to be disaggregating. Body and 
representation seem to be disaggregating. I kind of want to suture that a little bit 
with this image, I think, and sort of talk about what's happening between 
representation and materiality and the immaterial. So yeah, it's actually bringing 
up some really interesting contemporary questions that I'm not sure I have 
answers for, but it's making me aware of some of the discomfort, I guess I feel 
about representation right now in art, and in our social life as well, in media, in 
other avenues.

Thank you for joining us as we talked with Oliver Wunsch about the history of 
pastel and the limits and possibilities of connoisseurship as a tool to name the 
artist behind this portrait. In the next episode, I will talk with Roshini Kempadoo 
about her book Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence, and the Location of the 
Caribbean Figure. We will talk about what it means to work in the archive and its particular relationship to the geographic region of the Caribbean and also engage with the role of critical fabulation in art history today.

Caro Fowler 
Thank you for listening to In the Foreground Conversations on Art and Writing. 
For more information and links to the resources referenced in this episode, 
please visit clarkart.edu/rap/podcast. The Clark's Research and Academic 
Program would like to thank Erica Moiah James for her collaborative role in 
crafting this special iteration of the podcast.

In the foreground was co-created and produced by Caroline Fowler and Caitlin 
Woolsey, with editing by Caitlin Woolsey and Chase Bradshaw, sound mixing by 
CJ DeGennaro, an additional support from Shawnette Smalls and Noelle Derksen. 
Our intro music is by lightchaser and the music excerpts used in this special 
season are by Tomas Aquino and Maria Isabel Trinidad from the Smithsonian 
Folkways compilation Music from the Dominican Republic Volume 2, The Island of 
Espanola, released by Folkways Records in 1976, with more details about the 
songs featured available on our podcast webpage.

The Clark Art Institute sits on the ancestral homelands of the Mohican people. 
We acknowledge the tremendous hardship of their forcible removal from its 
homelands by the colonial settlers, a federally recognized nation. They now 
reside in Wisconsin and are known as the Stockbridge-Munsee community. As we 
learn, speak, and gather at the Clark, we pay honor to their ancestors past and 
present, and to future generations by committing to build a more inclusive and 
equitable space for all.