A Young Girl with an Enslaved Servant and a Dog

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Artist: Bartholomew Dandridge (British, 1691–1755)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 48 x 48 inches (121.9 x 121.9 cm)
Museum: Yale Center for British Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

In this portrait, a young girl stands in a lace-trimmed dress, accompanied by a dog and an enslaved servant, who hands her a basket of fruit. The servant and dog both wear metal collars, marking them as property. Bartholomew Dandridge’s painting gives especially clear expression to the way that many eighteenth-century portraits constructed their white sitters’ identities in relation to perceived “others,” including non-Europeans and animals.

The relief on the urn, which shows a group of cherubs taming a wild goat— an allegory of lust—serves as a contrast to the ostensibly chaste, “domesticated” love, which the young girl is shown to inspire in her two attendants. In fact, the possibility of sexual contact between white mistresses and black servants or slaves was a source of anxiety during the period.

Text: Yale Center for British Art.