After more than six years, a mystery woman captured in a portrait that was acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in 2020 has been identified, Artnet reports. The painting, which the museum acquired at auction at Sotheby’s, was signed J. Schul and dates back to the eighteenth century. It depicts a young Black woman, bedecked with pearls and holding an orange tree blossom.
Via painstaking research by fashion historians, museum experts and the like, the AGO determined that the painting was by Jeremias Schultz, who painted it in 1775; the subject is Eleonora Susette, an enslaved mixed-race woman from Guyana her last name is still unknown. As such, the painting has been re-christened Portrait of Eleonora Susette (Sotheby’s sold it under the moniker Portrait of a Lady Holding an Orange Blossom).
“For a long time, art historians have drawn our attention to foreign objects in Dutch still life compositions,” Adam Harris Levine, associate curator of European art at the AGO, told Artnet. “But it is important to think about this cultural context beyond the material and to think about peoples’ lives.”
The AGO made progress on identifying the painting’s subject when they found a companion portrait of a young Black man in an old auction catalogue, Artnet said. This led them to conclude that the subjects were brought to Amsterdam via the Dutch colonies.
A breakthrough came when the museum was contacted by a Dutch mother and son their direct ancestor turned out to be Jeremias Schultz’s first cousin, Beata Louise Schultz. The museum determined that Beata Shultz had commissioned her cousin to paint portraits of her son, her daughter and Michiel and Eleonora Susette: two enslaved people that Beata had asked permission from the Dutch government to bring to work in her home.
