"Stain’d with Divers Paints": Transatlantic Slavery in John Smibert’s Boston Studio, 1737

In 1737, Boston painter John Smibert advertised a reward for the return of an enslaved Black man named Cuffee, who had escaped wearing leather breeches “stain’d with divers sorts of Paints.” For Smibert, this painting of Turner was nothing special. He was a portraitist for hire, and had produced variations on the same composition many times before. Turner’s portrait is extraordinary, however, as a material manifestation of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, the fabulous wealth it created, and the culture it funded. Slave labor is invisible, yet embedded, in the paint and canvas of many colonial portraits. Because of Smibert’s advertisement, however, we are in the rare position of knowing that the labor of a specific enslaved man contributed directly to the creation of this artwork. Cuffee’s paint-stained breeches indicate he was in the studio. Was he cleaning? Handling boxes of paints? Stretching canvases? Roughing in background colors to dry? Something else? We will never know, but we cannot ignore the question. This paper argues that our gap in knowledge is not a dead end. Instead, it opens a productive space in which to interrogate the object, its original context, and the conceptual frameworks we use to understand it today.