SOURCE: King, Reyahn, “Ignatius Sancho and Portraits of the Black Elite.” In Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters, edited by Reyahn King and others, pp. 15-43. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997.

In the following excerpt, King considers Sancho's role as a man of letters in London's artistic circles, discusses the portrait done of him by the artist Thomas Gainsborough, looks at the lives of other members of Britain's Black elite, and examines the most important surviving eighteenth-century portraits of Africans in Britain.

Sancho may be styled—what is very uncommon for men of his complexion, A Man of Letters.

(The Monthly Review, 1783, pp. 492-7)

The 18th-century reviewer of Letters of the late Ignatius Sancho, an African, To which are prefixed, Memoirs of his Life clearly articulated contemporary opinion when he called Ignatius Sancho a man of letters. Although by the 19th century Sancho was considered a curiosity because...