Albert Huie, 1920-2010, Jamaican, Benjamin Dorrell, 1942
- Title:
- Benjamin Dorrell [2023, YCBA]
- Date:
- 1942
- Materials & Techniques:
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions:
- Overall: 29 1/8 × 25 3/16 × 2 3/4 inches (74 × 64 × 7 cm)
- Credit Line:
- Yale Center for British Art, Friends of British Art Fund
- Copyright Status:
- © Estate of the Artist
- Accession Number:
- B2023.6
- Classification:
- Paintings
- Collection:
- Paintings and Sculpture
- Subject Terms:
- boy | curtains | jar | knife | oranges | portrait
- Associated Places:
- Jamaica
- Associated People:
- Benjamin, Dorrell (1927–2002), Jamaican student, later moved to England in 1958
- Access:
- Not on view
- Link:
- https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:83670
- Export:
- XML
- IIIF Manifest:
- JSON
Dorrell, an orphan, sits in the Jamaican home of his adoptive guardian, a white Anglican minister who commissioned the portrait. The boy’s hand rests on a tobacco jar made of Lignum vitae, a wood commonly found on the island; on the table are locally grown citrus fruits. Posing his sitter alongside the country’s products as well as his guardian’s property, Huie alludes both to Jamaica’s identity apart from its colonizers and to the complex dynamics of colonialism. Huie traveled to London in 1947 to study art, returning home in the 1950s to become Jamaica’s leading artist after Independence. In 1958, Dorrell immigrated to Britain, one of half a million Caribbean people known as the “Windrush generation,” recruited by the government to help rebuild the nation’s economy after World War II. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2025
In a New Light: 500 Years of British Art (Yale Center for British Art, 2025-04-01 - 2026-01-30) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]
Dominic Fine Art, Dominic Fine Arts catalogue : Albert Huie & Dorrell : migration & exchange, Dominic Fine Art, Plymouth, Devon, pp. 1, 3, V 2962 (YCBA) [YCBA]
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