ABSTRACT

Comparing Géricault’s and Cruikshank’s works—encounters where whites deferentially stand before a black king— is revealing: where Cruikshanks’ king is grotesquely nude, a flimsy cloth sparing the sight of his hanging genitals, Géricault’s king is dressed in a simple garment, swaths of blue cloth lapping his thighs. One image is crude and plays to a white audience, while the other is decorous and guarded. The same remarks extend to the women portrayed—for Géricault’s draped attendants, unlike the burly king’s daughters with their snippets of cloth over their loins, are neither irreverent nor grotesque. By contrast, enveloped in bluish white garments, the women standing by Zaide’s side might even be more at home in a Parisian Salon than in Zaide’s tent. Although a king’s palace may indeed be an unassuming “assembly of thirty or forty straw huts”, the king himself is revered, subject to deference and decorum from his people.