The Octoroon, John Bell (1811–1895)

A fine and important English Parian figure of The Octoroon, after the model by John Bell, circa 1860.

The young woman is modelled standing in classical drapery, her wrists adorned with bracelets, Bell deliberately presenting his subject with an elegance and beauty that contrasts powerfully with her status as an enslaved woman.

The Octoroon belongs to a remarkable group of works through which Bell engaged with the contemporary debate surrounding slavery and abolition. The title derives from the nineteenth-century term for a person considered to be one-eighth of African ancestry. Bell’s choice of an apparently European-looking young woman was fundamental to the sculpture’s message: her beauty was part of the argument, confronting the Victorian viewer with the uncomfortable reality that under the racial laws of the American South she could nevertheless be treated as property.

Bell was one of the leading British sculptors of the nineteenth century and a pioneer in the use of Parian ware to bring important contemporary sculpture to a wider audience.

A particularly compelling example of Victorian sculpture in which beauty, craftsmanship and social history combine to create an object that remains as thought-provoking today as when it was first conceived.

H 43  x  W 15  x  D 15cm

English, circa 1860.