For decades, an unsettling portrait of Yale University’s namesake and early benefactor, British American colonist Elihu Yale, carried a maddeningly incomplete description. The painting shows four white men in costly 18th-century outfits posing around a table, with Yale at the center. As the men smoke and sip madeira, Yale’s grandchildren play in the field behind them.
In the right corner of the canvas, a child of African descent pours wine for the group. He wears fine red and grey clothes and—most disturbingly—a silver collar locked around his neck.
First donated to the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) in 1970 and exhibited sporadically over the past five decades, the painting was initially displayed with wall text that listed the men’s titles but did not mention the enslaved child at their side. When the gallery was rehung in 2016, a new line acknowledged little beyond the boy’s apparel: “Nothing is known... except that his livery identifies him as a servant, and the padlocked collar indicates that he is enslaved.”
Unanswered questions about the enslaved child haunted New Haven resident Titus Kaphar when he first saw the portrait in 2016. Inspired, the artist painted Enough About You, which warps the 18th-century work beyond recognition, save for the boy’s portrait, which is framed in gold.
Kaphar’s subject stares directly at the viewer and does not wear a collar. As the artist told Terence Trouillot of Artnet News in 2019, “I decided to physically take action to quiet [and crumple] the side of the painting that we’ve been talking about for a very long time and turn up the volume on this kid’s story.”
Four years after Kaphar created Enough About You, the YCBA embarked on a project to do just that. Last fall, after a landmark summer of protests against racial injustice, director Courtney J. Martin decided to temporarily remove the Yale group portrait from view. The museum hung Kaphar’s painting, on an eight-month loan from private collectors in California, in its place.
Meanwhile, a group of five YCBA employees volunteered to research the enslaved child and his portrait in new depth. Software engineer Eric James, senior curatorial assistant Abigail Lamphier, senior library assistant Lori Misura, coordinator of cataloging David K. Thompson and assistant curator Edward Town published their initial findings online earlier this year. Viewers can explore the report via the YCBA website and the related Yale and Slavery Research Project website.
As of this week, members of the public can once again view the reinstalled Yale portrait, bolstered by rewritten wall texts that add newfound historical context to the image, as Nancy Kenney reports for the Art Newspaper.