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This painting depicts the university’s early benefactor and namesake, Elihu Yale (1649–1721). He is seated between his sons-in-law, whose marriages to his daughters Catherine and Anne Yale had been brokered with the vast wealth he had accrued as a merchant and colonial administrator in India. While Yale’s grandchildren play in the background, an enslaved child, whose name is now unknown, serves wine to the men. Over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, many children of African and Indian descent, mostly boys, were separated from their families to serve as attendants in wealthy households in Britain. Often, these children were forced to wear metal collars, like the one seen here, to identify and recapture those who ran away.

Title

Elihu Yale with Members of his Family and an Enslaved Child

Date

c.1719

Medium

oil on canvas

Measurements

H 201.3 x W 235.6 cm

Accession number

B1970.1

Acquisition method

gift of Andrew Cavendish, eleventh Duke of Devonshire

Work type

Painting

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Yale Center for British Art

1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06510-2302, USA,

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