WILLIAM BLAKE British, 1757 - 1827

A Negro hung alive by the Ribs to a Gallows

in J. G. Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam,
Volume 1, 1806

engraving Lent by UNC-CH's Rare Book Collection

Stedman’s Narrative is a rare first-hand observation of eighteenth-century plantation slave life with eighty illustrations. Stedman arrived in South America in 1773 as captain of a troop sent by the Dutch government for a military campaign against rebel slaves. Using a diary kept during his five-year stay in Surinam, he completed the first manuscript of the Narrative in 1790. Though Stedman himself was not an abolitionist, the tortured slave imagery in the Narrative provoked a large public response and became an important source material for the abolitionists.

Here William Blake uses several pictorial devices to endow the black figure with a certain monumentality. He minimizes the pictorial details. In particular, the background is evacuated, leaving only a few skulls, thus giving the black figure an almost iconic quality. It is easy to associate this image of torture with Christian iconography of martyrdom.

Kee-Lee Lee