© NATIONAL TRUST IMAGES/JOHN HAMMOND
In Peter Lely’s 1651 portrait at Ham House, the Countess of Dysart stands stiff as starched lace, clad in blue and bronze silk. A black servant bends towards her, proffering a plate of roses. She gazes coolly out at the world; he looks up at her, perhaps admiring, perhaps wary. We don’t know his name. That’s often the case, though not always: the young black man kneeling at the feet of John Spencer (the six-times greatgrandfather of Diana, Princess of Wales), painted by George Knapton in 1744, was a slave called Caesar Shaw. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was fashionable for rich white people to be painted with a black person carrying fruit or flowers, holding the horse’s bridle or the dog’s collar. There are scores of these portraits in museums and country houses, bearing testimony to the often overlooked black presence in the British past.