25 October 2022

Mocho of Guinea (c. 1722-c. 1780). The life of an enslaved Black servant in a portait of the 10th Earl Marischal of Scotland

Talk by Dr David Alton. Part of online annual seminar Understanding British Portraits. Free, bookings on Eventbrite with links via Understanding British Portaits website.

It is unusual to be able to identify the Black children and teenagers who appear as enslaved servants in portraits of British aristocrats – and only rarely can we discover anything of their lives. Mocho is an exception. We can recover details of his life in two Scottish Jacobite households in continental Europe – with the Earl Marischal in Spain, and later in Neuchâtel, and with the Earl’s younger brother, Field Marshall James Keith, in Ukraine, St Petersburg, Finland and in Prussian campaigns of the Seven Years War. Mocho was one of the Earl’s group of servants, referred to as his ‘ménagerie of young heathens’, who were known to Voltaire and Rousseau and, at least some of them, to James Boswell, David Hume and Adam Ferguson. We can only imagine the earlier traumas of Mocho’s childhood and enslavement – but we should not forget them.