Caption title.
Lettered "Pub 15 of Nov by S W Fores 50 Picadilli."
Sarah (or "Saartjie") Baartman was a Khoikhoi woman born circa 1788 near Cape Town, South Africa. She was brought to Britain in 1810 by her employer, Hendrik Cesars, and the English doctor William Dunlop, where she was exhibited for financial gain and subsequently sold in 1814 to animal trainer S. Reaux, who exhibited her in Paris before her death in 1815. This print is one of a series of political caricatures which exploit Baartman's image to attack members of Great Britain's former national unity or "Broad Bottom" government (also known as the "Ministry of All the Talents"), led by William Grenville who had served as Prime Minister from February 11, 1806 to March 31, 1807.
A significant body of scholarship and historical writing exists on Sarah Baartman, with full-length studies including Clifton Crais & Pamela Scully's Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus : a ghost story and a biography (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2009), with a list of bibliographical references on pages 207-228; Rachel Holmes's The Hottentot Venus : the life and death of Saartjie Baartman : born 1789 - buried 2002 (London ; New York : Bloomsbury, 2007); and Representation and Black womanhood : the legacy of Sarah Baartman / edited by Natasha Gordon-Chipembere (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Library's copy trimmed within plate mark.
A political cartoon featuring a racist caricature of Sarah Baartman and Lord Grenville. The two are shown standing and facing each other in profile, and both are tinted with brown ink and drawn with protruding buttocks. Baartman wears a cloak of long-haired fur over her right shoulder, and Grenville a peer's mantle over his left shoulder, and both wear girdles, necklaces of beads, caps, garters from which hang fringes of hair, and broad gold armlets. Both smoke small pipes. Behind Grenville stands his brother, the Marquis of Buckingham, and behind Baartman is Buckingham's son, Lord Temple,