2024 Trevelyan Lecture: Fara Dabhoiwala

Image
Portrait of Francis Williams in eighteenth century dress, wearing a wig and standing at a table with books and a globe

Francis Williams, by an unknown artist

Black Genius: Science, Race, and the Extraordinary Portrait of Francis Williams (c. 1690-1762)

Fara Dabhoiwala

25 October 2024, 5pm (No booking required. First come, first served)
Bateman Auditorium, Gonville & Caius


In 1928, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired a previously unknown portrait. It shows the Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams (c. 1690-1762), dressed in a wig, surrounded by books and scientific instruments. In all of the previous history of Western art, there is no other image like this: a man who had been born into slavery, shown as a gentleman and scholar. The museum presumed it was a satire — but who had made it, when, where, and why, has remained a mystery ever since. 

Fara Dabhoiwala will present new research that has at last unlocked the puzzle of this extraordinary object, its sitter’s Cambridge connections, and its relationship to the scientific revolutions of the Enlightenment.

The portrait will be travelling to Cambridge for the first time in early 2025, exhibited at the Fitzwilliam Museum. 

Page credits & information

Image: Francis Williams, the Scholar of Jamaica, by unknown artist, about 1745, Jamaica. Museum no. P.83-1928. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London