Stop and Look: Portrait of Francis Williams

This work of art is an important record of a unique achievement in the world of its time.

Portrait of Francis Williams (1702-70), oil on canvas, Victoria and Albert Museum

Francis Williams was an eighteenth-century Jamaican whose parents were freed slaves. He was educated in England, and took English nationality. He was a poet, a thinker, and also exceptionally learned in matters scientific. He attended at least one meeting of the Royal Society, and was on intimate terms with some of the great minds of the age.

In his twenties, he retired to Jamaica and settled on the family estate of Frog Hall, near Spanish Town, at that time the capital, where he established a school for freed black citizens. He appears to have spent his life there as a teacher. When Halley’s comet appeared over Jamaica in 1759, he was able to refer to the comments on it in Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica giving an exact page reference in the second edition, which Francis Williams owned, and which features in the picture.

The painting summarises his career, including the passage of the comet, and the important collection of books in his own library. He is shown wearing an impressive suit of clothes which he cannot usually have worn in Jamaica, but which no doubt stood for his status in the society of the island, as well as his standing in England. The furniture shown is doubtless what he bought back with him from England, though it is, of course, mahogany – a Caribbean hardwood native to his own country. Above him, the elaborate knot in which the curtain is tied seems to be an attempt on his part to explain – literally to draw – the planetary movements leading to the appearance of the comet.

The picture as a whole has been seen as a satire, a caricature. It is clearly nothing of the kind. It is a demonstration of who Francis Williams is, and his position in Jamaican society. It is thought to have been made by a different artist called Williams, but my view, corresponding with that of some others, is that the painting is his own work, a demonstration of his artistic skills alongside his possessions and the record of his learning in his familiarity with the arguments in the Principia Mathematica.

There are some odd features – the proportion of the arm and legs, for instance. But similar distortions can be found in the work of other artists in the Caribbean at the period: William Williams (no relation) also painted subjects in a partly-symbolic style at the same time. But they do not have the authority, the personal weight of this portrait: the very specific details of the furniture, the clothes, the view from the window. This shows the panorama towards Spanish Town at the time of the eclipse, with the comet overhead, and two constellations in the sky elsewhere. It is fully understood as a natural phenomenon, and recorded as he would have seen it from where he lived.

Regardless of its standing as a work of art, this is an important record of a unique achievement in the world of its time.