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Credit
The voyage of the sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark. Source: Wellcome Collection.
The image depicts an African woman bound in manacles at the ankle, standing on a half-shell, being towed by dolphins to the Americas. She is attended by cherubs, and to the left is Triton, a Greek sea god, carrying the British flag and guiding the procession across the ocean. This composition was likely inspired by a 16th-17th century version of Sandro Botticelli's painting 'The Birth of Venus', Venus being the Roman goddess of love, beauty, sex and prosperity.
This plate was created to illustrate 'The history, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies' by Bryan Edwards, which was written to defend the practice of Transatlantic slavery. In this context, the image acts as a romanticised allegory of the forced transportation of African people to work as slaves in the Caribbean. It specifically accompanies a poem titled 'The sable Venus: an ode', written by Reverend Isaac Teale in 1765. This poem has been interpreted as either a sanitisation, or an explicit legitimisation, of the possession, eroticisation and rape of Black female slaves by their white owners.
More recent responses to this work include 'Black Venus', a linocut by Margaret Burroughs (c.1957), which reimagines the subject, and 'Voyage of the Sable Venus', a poem written by Robin Coste Lewis (2015), which uses the image and poem as reference to a wider exploration of oppressive language in museum and art catalogues.
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