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Scratch the Surface

Britain's involvement in the slave trade started when Elizabethan adventurer John Hawkins made a voyage to the coast of Sierra Leone, West Africa in 1562 with 100 men and three ships. While there, he kidnapped 300 people, sailed to the Caribbean and sold them to Spanish settlers.
Over the subsequent centuries, many people made their fortunes in the slave trade and related businesses such as banking, manufacturing and shipbuilding. These merchants commissioned paintings and collected art to show off their wealth and impress the traditional elite in the 18th century.
This exhibition examined the role that the slave trade played in the lives of two people featured in portraits in our collection: Zoffany's portrait of 'Mrs Oswald' and Sir Joshua Reynolds's 'Colonel Tarleton'.
Colonel Tarleton, as MP for Liverpool in the 1790s, argued very strongly in Parliament against the abolition of the trade. Mrs Oswald, along with her husband Richard Oswald, owed part of their wealth to a number of plantations in the Americas. The painting of Mrs Oswald was bought by the Gallery in 1938, while the Tarleton portrait was bequeathed to the Gallery by one of his descendants in the early 1950s.
As part of the exhibition, 2004 Turner Prize nominee, Yinka Shonibare MBE, was invited to create a new installation in response to these two portraits. This stunning new work went on display in the Barry Rooms.
'Scratch the Surface' is part of a range of activities and events that the National Gallery took part in commemorate the 200th anniversary of the 1807 Act to abolish the British trade in African people. Although the Act did not end slavery itself, it was the first attempt by the British to legally bring the trade to a close.

The High Place: Potosi

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana | Lima
Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

John Demos
On its coat of arms, in the late sixteenth century, appeared the following:

I am rich Potosi,
Treasure of the world.
The king of all mountains,
And the envy of all kings.

Its boast was justified; "rich as Potosi" would quickly become a byword for wealth and splendor throughout the premodern world. As late as 1806, and as far away as rural Massachusetts, local artisans might begin a complaint against the town fathers: "[They would] have you believe that when you entered the sandy plain of Dedham, you are upon a Potosi."
What, then, was this Potosi?
The key to its remote beginnings lies buried in the tectonic plates that shaped the South American continent and the Andes Mountain range. One mountain, in what is now southern Bolivia, was graced by these subterranean forces in a singular way. Though not especially high or otherwise conspicuous, it held within its conical flanks a silver lode of extraordinary size and purity.
And there it sat when the first human settlers–ancestors of the present-day Andean natives–arrived in the region roughly twenty thousand years ago. Millennia passed, societies rose and fell, till around 1200 A.D.–when first the Aymara, later the Inca, created large empires nearby. At some point the site was acknowledged, and perhaps named. In fact, the linguistic origins of Potosi are not known; but, according to one persistent tradition, it was an Aymara (or Quechua) word meaning "high place."
The native peoples apparently mined its silver from time to time, but not in any extensive way. Then, in the 1540s, as Spanish colonizers pushed south following their conquest of the Inca, everything about Potosi changed. A three-hundred-foot outcropping of silver ore, high on the mountain's western slope, suggested what lay underneath; by 1545 Spanish miners, and some Indians too, had begun tearing it away.

Inset of Potosi on Hermann Moll, Map of South America. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

From then on, for half a century, the boom around the cerro rico (rich hill) developed fantastically. In 1547 Potosi's population was about 14,000, in 1571 perhaps 40,000, by 1600 at least 150,000. This raised it to the demographic level of the chief capitals of Europe and Asia (London, Amsterdam, Canton, Tokyo), and made it by far the largest human community in the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, its population formed an astonishing, unprecedented mix. A 1611 estimate included 3,000 Spaniards, 40,000 non-Spanish Europeans (French, German, Italian, Portuguese, English, among others), 35,000 Creoles (American-born, many of mixed-race parentage), 76,000 Indians (themselves representing numerous different ethnic and cultural backgrounds), and 6,000 Africans (nearly all held as slaves by white Potosinos).