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Creator:
Albert Huie, born in Falmouth, Jamaica, 1920; active in Jamaica, Canada, England, and the United States; died in Baltimore, Maryland, 2010
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
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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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