"Painted from Life by Dan.l Orme and Engraved under his direction by his late Pupil P. R. Cooper." "The Portrait of George Alexander, An Extraordinary Spotted Boy, from the Caribbee Islands in the West Indies."
"George Alexander Gratton was a slave named after the overseer of the plantation in which he was born on the Caribbean island St Vincent in 1808. From birth, he showed signs of the then little-known skin condition vitiligo, which rendered him an object of curiosity. As a baby he was purchased for 1000 guineas (a sizeable sum for the period) by the travelling showman John Richardson, who took him back to England and exhibited him as an entertainment. This engraving was made after a now-lost painting by the artist Daniel Orme when George was eighteen months old, and reveals the era's attitudes towards both Afro-Caribbean peoples and those with unusual medical conditions. George's nakedness and juxtaposition with a mottled dog indicate that he was viewed more as an animal specimen than a human. The turtle on which he sits also references his 'exotic' origins in the West Indies. The objectification of a young child, which is so troubling to modern eyes, was partially a way for nineteenth-century viewers to understand physical difference. However, the highly problematic nature of his exhibition was compounded by the racist attitudes of the trans-Atlantic slavery era towards black Africans, which considered them to be both physically and morally inferior to white Europeans." daqui
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