Sprucely dressed

Carefully painted on card, this silhouette depicts a neatly dressed gentleman in a waistcoat with a standing collar, a frilled chemise and a deep stock, his hair brushed high on his forehead. The silhouette is housed in the original papier-mâché frame backed with the artist’s trade label no. 3. The silhouette is fine condition; likewise the frame though the pretty floral hanger has been secured at the front with a tack.

Recent research has revealed that ‘William Hamlet a Negro’ was baptized at Bath Abbey in 1772. The following year Thomas Gegg, a retired Jamaican planter, placed an advert in the Bath Chronicle (23 September 1773) appealing for the return of ‘a black man, who calls himself Wm Hamlet … well favoured, small in person, affects the beau in his gait, thinks himself of consequence and nothing is good enough for him’. But it appears that Hamlet made good his escape from the Gegg household as his marriage was recorded in Salisbury in 1779. The couple went on to have five children including twins. Quite how Hamlet established himself in the artworld is unclear as by the mid-1780s he was advertising profiles on card and on glass. He even found favour with the Royal Family who commissioned profiles from him whilst at Weymouth. William Hamlet died in Bath in 1822 at the age of 73.