Finding someone in plain sight

Chatsworth House

Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork and His Wife Lady Dorothy Boyle with Three Children, by Jean-Baptiste van Loo. Just two of the children are identified in the painting. View full image

Edward Town, assistant curator of paintings and sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art, was looking for a missing person.

In sifting through the extensive art collection at England’s Chatsworth House for a recent exhibit, curators there were intrigued by a 1739 painting by Jean-Baptiste van Loo of Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork, and His Wife Lady Dorothy Boyle with Three Children. Four names—the parents and daughters Dorothy and Charlotte (who later married into the Cavendish family of Chatsworth House)—are inscribed on a page lying at their feet.

There is, however, a fifth person—that third child of the title—whose name is not inscribed on the page. The Black boy, who looks about ten years old, has handed amateur painter Lady Dorothy a pigment-laden palette and holds a clutch of paintbrushes at the ready.

To identify him, Town traveled to Derbyshire and delved into the archives of Chatsworth, one of England’s great estates, passed down through seventeen generations. “Because they’ve had this continuity of ownership, these papers are in pristine condition,” says Town. He had previously worked with Chatsworth archivists and a Yale team to try to identify a Black child in a group portrait of Elihu Yale’s family that had once been owned by Chatsworth.

This time, Town found documents that identified the young man in the Lord Burlington painting as James Cumberlidge, a “favored” and “special status” house servant to Lady Dorothy. Cumberlidge’s cursive penmanship is graceful, says Town, as seen when he accounts “for all the small things that he’s buying for her, like medicines, snuff, and bits and bobs.” School bills refer to the education given to Lord Burlington’s Black servants. Town followed the paper trail to a nearby village and a white man named Cumberlidge who, in his will, gives “his liberty” to his servant Thomas, possibly James’s father.

The discovery sheds new light on the lives of Black Britons before the twentieth century. British law of Cumberlidge’s time was ambiguous about chattel slavery, says Town, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. Town admires the way Cumberlidge navigated “the racist world of Georgian Britain” but does not believe that he could have freely left the Countess’s employment. The Countess’s son-in-law was Lord Chamberlain to the king, and, after her death, Cumberlidge worked for 20 years as a trumpeter to the court of George II and III. Town still hopes to discover whether James owned property and voted.