ABSTRACT
The focus of this study is on Theodore Gericault’s (1791–1824) images of black men and women and children, figures reduced to chattel, people of color whose lives were shaped by their alterity, their blackness. When whites looked at black people or Africans in the early eighteen-hundreds, they saw dark-skinned figures servilely different from themselves, slaves or freed, voiceless shadows living far from their homeland, Senegal and Goree on the West African coast. And yet although people of color were seen as Other, Gericault’s peers sensed an uncertain bond between themselves and their black chattel, a tenuous semblance that was hardly compatible with their own self-image, their sense of self as white. This in effect shapes Gericault’s response to the Other. In sum, a discussion of Gericault’s black people confronts a host of problems, not the least of which is a dearth of documentary evidence.
