When John Nost’s Garden Statue with Sundial (attr. John Nost, ca. 1708) was placed on display at the Yale Center for British Art in the autumn of 2014, it wasn’t immediately recognised for its uncanny, racially charged depiction of Africa in eighteenth-century maps and allegories of the Four Continents or the fraught side of history it fell on. Having lived for fifty years in the outdoor courtyard of Yale University’s Jonathan Edwards College, it was better recognised as an offbeat piece of campus history, a statue that had collected weather damage and student graffiti until the 1970s, when it was placed back in storage at the YCBA.

Fortunately for contemporary viewers, keeping the piece out of sight – and out of mind – wasn’t the vision that Cyra Levenson, assistant curator of education at the Center, had for the work. Instead, she sought to put it on view precisely for its problematic, little-discussed history, placing it in conversation with over sixty of the Center’s painted portraits, busts, and maps for an exhibition that the university has needed to have for a very long time.

The exquisite, thought-provoking result was Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain. Curated by Levenson and Yale doctoral students Esther Chadwick and Meredith Garner, the show took a detailed and praiseworthily bold look at the University’s racially fraught founding and prejudiced past through its present collections. A significant chunk of these refer – both directly and indirectly – to the concept of the black body as a commodity in eighteenth-century Britain. To lend a digestive angle to the show’s context, the three curators divided the exhibition into several thematic parts: ‘Slavery, Empire and Portraiture’, ‘Portraits and Conversations’, ‘America and British Abolitionism’, ‘Reynolds’s Models’, ‘Staging Identities’, and ‘Portraits in Books, Books as Portraits’. Together, each section urged viewers to consider how these images – from traditional painted portraits to portrait busts, cartoons, and illustrated abolitionist literature – both engage with and diverge from the conventions of portraiture.

The first gallery, filled with what Levenson describes as “pieces that can seem disconnected from us but are not so far away”, read as a sort of case study around Elihu Yale, a Welsh benefactor of the then-called Collegiate School after whom Yale University was renamed in the early eighteenth century. There have been plenty of events in New Haven fêting Yale, and this was neither one of them nor not, offering instead an unflinching look at the realities of picturing him with young black servants and slaves. As the works glinted from the gallery walls, they fell into a sort of uncanny orbit around the Garden Statue, placed in the center of the room. Around it rotated Elihu Yale as he entertained a group of whites while a young black servant scurried around the table in his embellished livery, wide white eyes turned toward the conversation; Elihu Yale engraved on a snuffbox, into which tobacco from transatlantic trade routes and British colonies would go; Bartholomew Dandride’s deeply disquieting A Young Girl with an Enslaved Servant, which depicts a young black boy with a collar leaning behind the white child of his presumably white owner. In what Levenson terms “compositional somersaults”, visual cues are clear to any viewer, art historian or otherwise: if the servant in question were to stand, he would immediately be taller and perhaps more regal than the young girl, a reality thought too crude to pass.

This gallery set the tone for the remainder of the exhibition, which moved past the problem of Yale himself and onto the greater question of how and why figures were pictured together. For instance, William Hogarth’s Portrait of a Family (1785, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) is squarely situated in the ‘Portraits and Conversations’ section of the exhibition. Unlike the portrait of Elihu Yale, surrounded by his colleagues and a servant in full view, the Hogarth entered (and continues to) the rocky territory of enigma and historical omission; a servant is partially cropped from the painting, his once-recognizable brown body, velvety, colourful livery and serving tray literally reduced to half as the frame begins and the canvas ends. While a curatorial note explained that the painting’s “unusual dimensions, compressed composition, and the condition of the canvas suggest that it was cut down sometime after Hogarth completed it”, the cropped body itself raised questions about the hands in which the painting was altered, and specifically what they deemed worthy of removal.

To this, Levenson, Chadwick and Garner added works seeking to further interrogate the politics of picturing subjects – and more often servants – of colour, and the works they chose do so well: a Bust of a Man (ca. 1758, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) attributed to the studio of Francis Harwood and placed at the middle of the gallery read like a sort of question mark; Bernard Lens III’s miniature Portrait of a Young Man (n.d., Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection), his subject made regal only through a depiction of his servitude, interrogated the practice of white owners commissioning portraits of their servants to show their own wealth; James Bretherton’s hard-to-stomach High Life Below Stairs (1774, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University), based on the eponymous farce of 1759 and crude in its caricature of servants’ comportment, questioned the evolution of racist stereotype; and the inclusion of a servant in a hunting tableau, Arthur Davis, John Orde, His Wife Anne, His Eldest Son William, and a servant (c.1754-56, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) was left open-ended for the viewer to chew on.

These and others were a perfect introduction to what came as an aesthetically delicious but difficult prelude to the end of the exhibition: Reynolds’ models, an exhibition within an exhibition themselves. These men and women, all of them labeled only as “negro” in his sketchbooks, trace more than the development of the artist himself; they show, as does his George IV when Prince of Wales with a negro page (1787, His Grace The Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle), his journey from another artist practising in colonialist Britain to a professed and active abolitionist. This is not to say that his journey to reformed, enlightened artist is not present all along, for a kernel of it is from the outset; consider his earlier and quite beautiful Portrait of a Man (c.1770, The Menil Collection, Houston) .The subject, a black man who has gone unidentified (he is thought to possibly be the artist’s black footman) looks heavenward, clouds behind him fanning out across a green-grey sky. The image falls short of regal, but not by much, entering the exhibition’s ambivalent dialogue on portraiture with a new voice.

This made the final room, ‘Staging Identities’, a kind of satisfyingly open-ended final chapter. Among Thomas Gainsborough’s images of Ignatius Sancho (1768), engravings of British servant Ottobah Cugoano, executed at the height of the antislavery movement, and texts by abolitionists, two questions emerged that the viewer could take with them:

Am I falling on the right side of history?

And by how much?

Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain was at the Yale Center for British Art from 2nd October to 14th December 2014.