“The Head of a Hogshead:” Neptune Thurston and Enslaved Artistic Labor in British North America

“Neptune was my first master. The first idea I ever had of painting the human features, I received from seeing that old African draw a face.” So declared Gilbert Stuart, premier portraitist of the early republic. Scholars have noted Neptune Thurston’s influence on young Stuart, and bemoaned the lack of evidence about this enslaved cooper from Newport, Rhode Island. This paper examines Thurston’s unusual portraits, long ago destroyed. Completed in chalk on “the head of a hogshead” or barrel, they recalled African face jugs, depicting faces “laughing, crying, [in] fear, [and] anger.” Placed on containers for exported commodities, I suggest their intended audience was the enslaved dockworkers of African descent who hauled barrels in Newport and the Caribbean and recognized the faces’ cultural origins. Thurston’s ephemeral renderings on the hogsheads he fabricated were a form of resistance. They illuminate the artistic labor of an array of enslaved workers across the British North American colonies who have been overlooked. These bondmen processed pigments for color shops, painted the exteriors of plantation houses, gilded carriages, as well as stretched canvases and carried finished paintings for white artist-enslavers. These men's mechanical labor aided white portraitists even as those artists sought to raise their professional status by emphasizing intellectual labor, restricting knowledge, and condemning certain forms of painting. What does the story of American art look like if we consider the depictions produced by Neptune Thurston and Gilbert Stuart, the artistic labor of both white and enslaved men in North America?