Sable Venus

In contrast to the Hottentot Venus, the Sable Venus was not a real woman but an imaginal woman. A book, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, by Bryan Edwards includes a poem, "The Sable Venus: An Ode," by Isaac Teale. The poem compares the Sable Venus to the Venus of Botticelli.
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Teale says that — at least at night, when there is no light — there is no difference between the black Venus and the white Venus:

The loveliest limbs her form compose,
Such as her sister VENUS chose,
In FLORENCE, where she's seen;
Both just alike, except the white,
No difference, no – none at night,
The beauteous dames between. (Edwards: 34-5)

The second volume of the third edition of the book in 1801 includes both the poem and an image. The image is "The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies" by Thomas Stothard, Esquire, of the Royal Academy.
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If any image is obscene, this is it. It is iconography as pornography. "No more preposterous misinterpretation was ever perpetrated of the ‘Middle Passage,'" Hugh Honour says, than the Sable Venus. Honour remarks that neither the poem nor the image "so much as alludes to slavery: the theme of both is the physical charm of the black woman" .
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