Gabriel Manigault

Jeremiah Theus

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Portraits of the South Carolina Manigault family patriarch and matriarch (28.126.2) by Charleston’s leading 18th-century painter, the Swiss-born Jeremiah Theus, document two centuries of aristocratic privilege as well as the material afterlives of what made it possible. Son of a French Huguenot merchant, Manigault was considered the wealthiest man in colonial South Carolina, who supported the revolutionary cause with his private fortune derived from rice plantations run by slave-labor. He reportedly counted nearly 300 enslaved individuals as his property at one time. These works also hold a history of the family’s declining fortunes post-emancipation. In 1867, a descendant, Charles Izard Manigault, recorded how the paintings were defaced (see black-and-white images), likely after their removal to the family’s Silk Hope plantation for safe-keeping during the Civil War. Recent scholarship has proposed this deliberate disfigurement of the canvases as acts of iconoclasm and rebellion by formerly enslaved residents of Silk Hope.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art