Price: $2,200.00
SKU: 103197
MEDIUM: Stipple and line engraving
DATE: c. 1794
EDITION SIZE: Paper size 6 1/16 x 4 9/16" (15.5 x 11.6 cm)
DESCRIPTION: This early abolitionist stipple engraving presents a bold and uncompromising vision of equality at the very height of the age of Revolution. At the center of the composition stand two men, one Black and one white, depicted with the same stature and dignity, their hands clasped firmly in a gesture of solidarity. Each grasps a liberty pole crowned with the Phrygian cap, the emblem of revolutionary freedom. Above them unfurls a ribbon bearing the tripartite motto Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, and beneath their feet runs a striking declaration: “Liberty is the right and happiness of all, for all by nature are equal and free, and no one can without the utmost injustice become the slave of his like.” In smaller type, the source is given as “Inscribed on the Athenian Statue of Liberty.” The imagery is remarkable for its symmetry, grandeur, and defiance. Both figures are rendered as magnificent and resolute, standing as equals without trace of subservience, hierarchy, or plea. In this way the print offers one of the earliest visual statements of interracial fraternity, an insistence that liberty was indivisible and that emancipation was not a matter of benevolence but of natural justice. The composition’s balance, its mirrored dignity, and its bold invocation of classical and revolutionary symbolism would have made it instantly recognizable to contemporaries as part of the radical language of the 1790s. The fact that such an image was conceived and printed as early as c.1794 underscores its extraordinary nature, anticipating by decades the abolitionist iconography more familiar to later generations. The print’s message resonates closely with the work of William Hodgson, a physician, translator, and printer deeply embedded in the radical circles of the decade. Hodgson, imprisoned in Newgate in 1795 for seditious libel, was among those who used the press to challenge political repression and extend the principles of the French Revolution to the struggles for universal rights. Radical printers like Hodgson and his associates often blurred the lines between author, translator, and publisher, working collectively to circulate dangerous ideas under conditions of censorship and persecution. The inclusion of mottos and imagery drawn directly from revolutionary France points to this transnational exchange of symbols and ideals, reflecting the international dimensions of the struggle for emancipation and equality. Although the engraver of this image remains unidentified, advertisements for Hodgson’s publications note that artists such as Henry Richter provided designs for some of his editions, making Richter a possible candidate. The engraving may originally have served as a frontispiece to one of Hodgson’s pamphlets, sold for an accessible price to a broad public, or it may have circulated independently as a statement print. In either case its visual rhetoric was strikingly ahead of its time, refusing to compromise on equality and mutual recognition, and standing out as a phenomenal and unprecedented intervention in abolitionist imagery. Surviving impressions are extraordinarily scarce, with institutional holdings such as that at the Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic Literature in London describing the work as “very rare.” Its rarity only heightens its importance: the engraving embodies the “plebeian Jacobin” embrace of emancipation and liberty, preserving in visual form the radical politics of the 1790s. Not only in Britain but in a broader revolutionary context, it must be counted among the most remarkable early artistic assertions of interracial solidarity, phenomenal in its timing, radical in its execution, and likely dating to around 1794.
ADDITIONAL INFO: Framed
CONDITION: Good condition, small section of the bottom right coroner is missing.
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