It was painted to celebrate the groundbreaking achievements of a mathematical genius who was Black and born into slavery. But for more than 260 years, that great scientific intellect of Francis Williams went unnoticed.
Now, clues uncovered through an X-ray and high-resolution scans of the painting have finally revealed the extraordinary secret that 18th-century proponents of slavery tried to keep hidden.
New evidence uncovered by a Princeton historian, Prof Fara Dabhoiwala, indicates that the painting is the earliest example in Western art of a named Black person celebrating their status as an intellectual.
The portrait of Williams, a wealthy Jamaican polymath freed from slavery as a child, was commissioned by the furniture curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1928, mainly because it featured fine mahogany furniture.
It has long been mistaken for a satirical painting mocking its Black subject for having the audacity to pretend to be a Georgian gentleman and scholar. But it is now thought to have been commissioned by Williams himself in 1760 to immortalize his brilliance as a pioneering astronomer who, according to the clues in the painting, successfully managed to recalculate the trajectory of Halley’s Comet and to see Jamaica in 1759.
This brilliant mathematical breakthrough, which Edmond Halley’s predictions in 1705 confirmed about when the comet would reappear and prove Isaac Newton’s universal theory of motion and gravity for the first time was credited solely to white astronomers who observed Halley’s comet elsewhere.
It is only thanks to the newly uncovered evidence hidden in the painting that Williams – who was introduced as a fellow of the Royal Society at a meeting attended by Newton and Halley in 1716, but later by a small committee was rejected “because of his complexion. ” – can finally claim his place as a pioneering Black intellectual in the history of science.
When Dabhoiwala realized that a scan of the painting revealed new titles in the bookcase, he was able to date the painting to around the time of the comet, decades after it was previously thought to have been painted.
Dabhoiwala also discovered the meaning of the page number carefully inscribed on the book Williams was reading: it is the page in the third edition of Newton’s Principia which discusses how to calculate the trajectory of a comet by reference to the constellations around it.
An X-ray of the window scene depicted in the background of the painting showed lines cutting what looked like a pale white comet, streaking across the sky at dusk, connecting with astonishing precision to constellations of stars. These stars would have been visible in that position in the sky when Halley’s Comet was in the sky over Jamaica in 1759, according to research by Dabhoiwala.
“I think this painting makes a very powerful statement,” says Dabhoiwala, who is a public lecture at the Q&A Wednesday evening about his findings, which will also be published in the London Review of Books. “It says: ‘I, Francis Williams, free Black gentleman and scholar, have witnessed the most important event in the history of science in our lifetime, the return of Halley’s comet. And I calculated its trajectory according to the rules of the third edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia’.”
He said the comet’s reappearance was “immensely important to all educated, intellectual people throughout the Western world at this time. Everyone is waiting for Halley’s comet because it will prove that Newtonian science – modern science – works, that everything is affected by gravity, that we have figured out the universal principle at the heart of the universe… But it also has a deep personal resonance for Francis Williams, because probably no one else outside of Europe has ever lived who met and talked with Halley and Newton. They are all dead.”
Instruments for drawing and making complex mathematical calculations are depicted on the table in front of Williams. “I think it shows that he did it,” Dabhoiwala said.
By 1759, Williams had inherited a large estate in Jamaica, including plantations and enslaved people, from his formerly enslaved African father. After setting up a school for young, free Black people, he died childless in 1762. Nothing he wrote about his intellectual endeavors has ever been found. “He is a black man in a white supremacy society. No one thinks it is worth keeping anything with him,” said Dabhoiwala.
His portrait was sold to the V&A by the descendants of Edward Long, a white plantation owner and historian who, along with the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, ridiculed Williams’ intellect in print, lending credence to the idea that the portrait must have been have. satirical.
