We have a duty not to offend others without good reason, but we also have a duty not to be offended by others without good reason.
The Art Newspaper recently ran an article with the title “What should we do about paintings with racist titles?”As an example, it gave the Portrait of a Negress by Marie-Guillemine Benoist, painted in 1800 and owned by the Louvre.
The portrait is a splendid one by a female artist, of an elegantly seated black woman in a snowy white turban and gown, semi-naked from the waist up. It is obvious, at least to me, that we are intended to admire her beauty, as indeed we do. There is no doubting, either, the intelligence of her gaze: the artist could hardly have made it plainer.
There doesn’t seem to me anything that is intrinsically demeaning in the title. The term negress was not, in and of itself, an insulting or demeaning one at the time. Art galleries are full of portraits that do not name their subjects but merely refer to some general characteristic or other such as youth, age, country of origin, occupation, and so forth. This does not demean or dehumanise the subject, and no sensible person would take such a title to mean that the characteristic chosen for it—peasant, servant, soldier, or whatever—is supposed to define him or her completely. Portraiture is not caricature, and the anonymity of a sitter implies no disrespect, let alone contempt or hatred.
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in Law & Liberty