George Washington with His Family and Personal Valet, 1796
Description
Painting by Edward Savage, 1796. The image shown here is a (mistakenly) reversed image of the original, in which G.W. appears on the left (see, for example, the b/w reproduction published in Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art [Menil Foundation, Harvard University Press, 1989], vol. 4, pt. 1, p. 47, fig. 13). The black servant shown in the upper left hand corner (on the right in the original painting) is usually identified as William (Billy) Lee, G.W.'s valet and favorite slave, but some scholars have speculated that he may be, in fact, Christopher Sheels, who served in that capacity after Lee became crippled in the 1780s. There is no documented likeness of William Lee so that any identification is conjectural (Sidney Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770-1800 [New York Graphic Society, 1973, pp. 218-19], pp. 33, 35).
Source
Original painting in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. (NGA accession # 1940.1.2)
Creator
Savage, Edward
Language
English
Rights
Image is in the public domain. Metadata is available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.
Identifier
NW0114
Spatial Coverage
North America--Washington D.C.
Item sets
Citation
"George Washington with His Family and Personal Valet, 1796", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed March 20, 2023, http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/499
![Painting by Edward Savage, 1796. The image shown here is a (mistakenly) reversed image of the original, in which G.W. appears on the left (see, for example, the b/w reproduction published in Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art [Menil Foundation, Harvard University Press, 1989], vol. 4, pt. 1, p. 47, fig. 13). The black servant shown in the upper left hand corner (on the right in the original painting) is usually identified as William (Billy) Lee, G.W.'s valet and favorite slave, but some scholars have speculated that he may be, in fact, Christopher Sheels, who served in that capacity after Lee became crippled in the 1780s. There is no documented likeness of William Lee so that any identification is conjectural (Sidney Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770-1800 [New York Graphic Society, 1973, pp. 218-19], pp. 33, 35).](http://www.slaveryimages.org/files/large/6200fdb21886555e549c013d91929e96a9d18ffa.jpg)
