Ignatius Sancho and the Visual Arts
Joseph Jekyll’s notoriously unreliable biographical sketch of Ignatius Sancho, which appeared at the start of Sancho’s posthumously published Letters (1782), dispatches quickly with Sancho’s connection to the visual arts: “Painting was so much within the circle of Ignatius Sancho’s judgement and criticism, that Mortimer came often to consult him.” This brief line scarcely does justice to the deep connections between Sancho and the visual-artistic culture of his time. It is true that John Hamilton Mortimer (1741–1779) was a friend, and Sancho mentioned him in a letter of November 26, 1774, evidently both well aware of Mortimer’s involvement in London’s artistic scene and part of his social circle. Mortimer was a student of Sir Joshua Reynolds, one of the founding President of the Royal Academy of Arts. Sancho sat for at least one portrait, by Thomas Gainsborough, in 1768, and it is likely that a portrait painted a decade earlier, once thought to depict Olaudah Equiano, is also an image of Sancho. These portraits demonstrate the extent to which Sancho was embedded in the visual culture of his time, and they open the way to discussion of the Black presence in British art of this period, as discussed here: