The unsettling sight of blackamoors

I was visiting Vancouver, Canada, some years ago when I wandered into an interesting antiques shop. That was before I began haunting auctions, but even back then I had a hankering for the old.

Browsing the shop, I came across two figurines black and beautiful with gold accents. I had not seen such items before and stopped to take a good look at them. They were a man and a woman with bowls on their heads, and their lips were painted a shiny red.

I don’t normally waste my time with any vintage black item with red lips, but there was something different about these. The images were not offensive; in fact, they seemed dignified and natural – not the stereotypical images most often assigned of old to black people. She even had braids in her hair.

The woman was on her knees, and the man had one leg on the ground and another bent at the knee. She had a clear rhinestone in her navel and more in her necklace, and he had a turquoise stone in his necklace. There was no marking on them. I liked them, so I bought the two and had them shipped home to me.

Since then, I’ve seen quite a lot of these black figures at auction, very few as well-crafted as the ones I bought in Vancouver. Most were table-top pieces like mine, but I was accosted by a floor model recently that was almost as tall as me.

I learned that these were decorative art pieces called blackamoors, the earliest of which dated to 17th-century Italy. They are said to depict black North African men and women. Impressed with the men as fighters, Italian families of the period took them on as personal body guards or for their private armies, according to this antiques website.

Then Venetian sculptors began carving wooden images of them in their native dress into candelabras, statues, foot stools, tables and other works.

The best-known of these sculptors was Andrea Brustolon, who carved Baroque-style furniture for wealthy patrons that featured blackamoors. These pieces were made throughout Italy during the 18th century and well into the 20th century, and apparently are still popular today beyond those shores.

One blogger noted that although the images were exploited and depicted negatively (most appeared to be servants of some sort), they never lost the grace and style inherent in the original people. In other words, beneath the painted lips and black paint was a regalness.

That may be both the appeal and repulsion of the blackamoor figures. I came across several blogs in which the writers flogged themselves for liking them. I understood their apprehension based on some of the pieces at auction and the ones featured on the blogs and the web. The most lovely of them can in fact be complimentary.

But I’ve seen photos of just as many bearing the unflattering features that predominate most of what collectors call Black Americana. On a retail crafts site, I even came across some grossly stereotypical Black Americana pieces that were falsely described as blackamoors.

The blackamoor I bought seemed to be made of ceramic or plaster. But some I found on the web were made of a host of materials, and were represented in forms ranging from umbrella holders, candelabras, trays, bowls, planters, bookends, lamps and busts. This auction house was selling what it described as 18th-century to 19th-century Italian blackamoors for up to $165,000.

What is considered the best example of a blackamoor figure is in the collection of the Grunes Gewolbe museum in Dresden, Germany – the “Moor with Emerald Cluster,” created in 1724. It is the heavily jeweled figure of a man about 2 feet tall.

Noted Russian writer and poet Alexander Pushkin was said to have had a blackamoor on his desk (and can be seen at his old apartment that is now a museum in St. Petersburgy, Russia). He got started and never finished a novel called “The Blackamoor of Peter the Great” about his African maternal great-grandfather who was a favored general of Peter the Great. The great-grandfather was said to be skilled in the sciences and accepted as a member of the royal family.

Blackamoor images also were made into brooches and earrings, and I found some lovely jeweled ones on the web, including a $60,000 brooch from the Elizabeth Taylor collection that sold at Christie’s in December.