Thomas Stuart Smith was born in Scotland in late 1815, and travelled around Europe painting and learning from others. After the death of his father in ca. 1835, Smith made contact with his uncle Alexander Smith (a banker), who funded Thomas’ painting exploits around Europe. Smith’s father was involved in the colonisation of Canada as a secretary and accountant of the Canada Company, and was later active as a merchant in Cuba. Thomas lost his father’s letters, and so we are uncertain of what this merchanting involved, but sugarcane was the most prominent Cuban product at the time — grown by thousands of enslaved people. Despite no direct links to slavery, it is important to note that Thomas Stuart Smith likely benefitted from it.

In this portrait, Smith celebrates American abolition of slavery with the inclusion of the Emancipation Proclamation in the background. The textual element of the proclamation turns the static portrait into a narrative, implicating it within the American Civil War but also within the greater narrative of civil rights even up to the present day. The pipe in the painting contains the very tobacco that enslaved peoples worked to produce, so the act of lighting the pipe creates a great symbol of ignition and rebellion. Smith submitted this painting to the Royal Academy for its summer exhibition but was rejected, on what he thought were political grounds, and instead hung the painting in a Select Supplementary Exhibition in Old Bond Street.

In this portrait, the model smokes an already-lit cigarette, dressed in clothes of a higher class, perhaps denoting that this is supposed to be after the moment of freedom of the enslaved peoples. The ‘Cuba’ lettering could be a link to Smith’s father’s merchanting exploits in Cuba, or it could also be an allusion to the slavery that still continued to boom in Cuba in these years. Smith seems to focus on the individuality of the man in this portrait: there is a greater detail here of the fold in his shirt, the creases of the jacket, and the exact shadows of the bones of his face. This portrait is celebratory in a similar way to The Pipe of Freedom, attending not so much to the struggles of this man or his people, but their success.

This portrait, hung in the 1869 RA Summer Exhibition, presents an ordinary man from North Africa (Jan Marsh notes that ‘Kinneh’ likely denotes Qena, a town north of Luxor). Implications of slavery and abolition are less obvious in this painting, which rather focuses on the life of ordinary people. The blanket is Moroccan in design and the background appears to be a nomad’s tent. Smith was hugely interested in travel and culture, but also lived in a time where the colonial gaze was the norm. The colonial gaze was developed as an idea by Frantz Fanon in which the coloniser and their ‘gaze’ create Otherness in the colonial subject, something that is evident in this painting. Egypt would indeed soon be occupied by British forces in 1882.