Title: Francis Williams, the Scholar of Jamaica
Artist: possibly William Williams (English, 1727-1791)
Date: ca. 1759
Genre: portraiture
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 66 cm (25.9 in) high x 50 cm (19.6 in) wide
Location: Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Francis Williams (ca. 1690-ca. 1770), born into an affluent family of free Black persons in Jamaica, received schooling in Europe, became a barrister at Lincoln's Inn in 1721, and received the status of British subject in 1723. He wrote elegant poetry in both English and Latin and was keenly interested in natural science, but his bid for membership in the Royal Society was rejected due to his skin color.
In 2024, Princeton scholar Fara Dabhoiwala argued that Williams commissioned this portrait of himself to commemorate his scientific work, specifically his confirmation, through calculation and observation, that Halley's Comet would pass over Jamaica in 1759. To honor this previously unrecognized achievement, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named a main belt asteroid 20610 Franciswilliams on 7 April 2025.
In the LRB, Fara Dabhoiwala lays out his extraordinary research showing that this 18th century painting at the V&A, long interpreted as a racist caricature, actually depicts Jamaican gentleman scientist Francis Williams documenting his observations and calculations of the first expected return of Halley's Comet, which was proof of Newtonian physics.
image: William Williams, attr., Francis Williams, The Scholar of Jamaica, prob 1760, not 1745, in the V&A
A literally breathtaking essay: remarkable and riveting
The only certainty about the picture is that it shows Francis Williams. No one has ever been able to discover who...
"In the autumn of 1928, a previously unknown painting turns up on the London art market. It belongs to a Major Henry Howard of Surrey. He is 45 years old. His father has just died and left him a large estate, and he’s selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end soon. He needs cash.
Howard is knowledgeable about art. He’s a serious connoisseur and collector, an expert on Wenceslaus Hollar, the prolific 17th-century Bohemian printmaker. Among his inheritance is the family’s great collection of paintings, including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar plantations worked by enslaved people in Jamaica. And this portrait had been owned by a famous ancestor, of whom they are very proud, an 18th-century planter and writer called Edward Long.
So when Howard takes the painting to a London dealer, he explains that it had belonged to his great-great-great-grandfather, who had lived in Jamaica in the mid-18th century; that it was painted in Spanish Town, the colony’s capital; and that it showed a man called Francis Williams, about whom Long had written a whole chapter in his celebrated History of Jamaica (1774). Not only that, he says, but when Long was writing that chapter, he had this painting in front of him and was describing it.
The dealer, Jack Spink, is delighted to have this information and uses it to advertise the picture. He recognises it as an unusual object, with excellent ‘associative’ value, and is sure it will make a quick sale for a good price, probably in America. They like this kind of thing over there. He has some leaflets printed and takes out a full-page advert in Country Life. At the top is a photograph of the painting, and beneath it a lengthy extract from Long’s chapter about Francis Williams – the first two and a half pages of it, no less, in tiny but legible print. That’s the only description provided. To the Howard family, and to Spink, Long’s words explain this picture. It’s an understandable presumption, since pretty much all that is known about Francis Williams comes from Long’s ten-page chapter about him. It remains the only detailed contemporary account of his life, and it was written by someone who had known him.
The problem is that Long was, in fact, Williams’s greatest enemy. His potted biography was a malicious hatchet job, full of lies and half-truths, that sought to bury rather than to commemorate its subject. Long’s huge, three-volume History of Jamaica wasn’t really a ‘history’ at all. Angrily composed in the aftermath of the Somerset ruling of 1772, which had undermined the certainty of slaveholding in England, it was above all a defence of West Indian slavery as ‘inevitably necessary’ and an attempt to prove that all ‘black’ people were naturally inferior to the ‘white race’.
It is ironic, therefore, that Long is our main source about Francis Williams, who in his lifetime (he died in 1762) had been the most famous Black person in the world, at least among educated English-speaking people. He was rich; he was a gentleman; he was a scholar; he was celebrated as a clever and accomplished person. His memory lived on after his death. In 1774, when trying to argue that Black people were inherently less intelligent than ‘Whites’, Long had to accept that his readers would already know about Williams. He was forced to write about him because, to prove his theory of innate white superiority, he needed to take him down."
The Legacy of Francis Williams and the Rise of Palmer Luckey
The Legacy of Francis Williams
In the mid-18th century, Francis Williams emerged as one of the most renowned Black figures in the English-speaking world. A scholar, scientist, and gentleman, he received his education at Cambridge University but spent much of his life in Jamaica. Following his death in 1762, proponents of slavery sought to undermine his legacy, attempting to prove that a man like…
An incredible piece of work on Black 18th century scientist Francis Williams by Fara Dabhoiwala. Dabhoiwala has proved that this portrait was made under Williams’ direction to highlight his own expertise in high-level mathematics and astronomy. The white area in the sky is Halley’s comet.
The only certainty about the picture is that it shows Francis Williams. No one has ever been able to discover who...
