How a portrait by colonial Black painter Prince Demah landed in the The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He joins Scipio Moorhead as 1 of the 2 earliest known enslaved portrait painters.
In December 1769 Christian wrote to her friend Elizabeth Murray Smith, a fellow merchant, that Henry had recently purchased the son of their slave Daphney and confided their “design of improving his genius in painting.”2 Daphney’s son, Prince, was a young man in his late twenties and not a stranger to the Barnes household, but we know little about his life before Henry purchased him. He and his mother were baptized in Boston’s Trinity Church in May 1745,3 and he may have spent his early years on Boston’s South Shore, where Christian’s relatives lived. For now, Prince enters the historical record through Christian’s letters of 1769 and 1770.4
Prince Demah Barnes, Portrait of William Duguid, oil on canvas, 1773. Metropolitan Museum of Art accession number 2010.105
