Brown Study, 1949

Arnold Mason RA (1885 - 1963)

RA Collection: Art

This painting seems to have been the artist’s only portrait of a Black sitter. Arnold Mason was a prolific portraitist and exhibited many paintings of named individuals at the Royal Academy. The title of this painting is outdated, reductive and othering, but Mason likely intended it to identify the work as an aesthetic study of a female ‘type’, rather than the racist connotations that the title evokes today. Mason made several other paintings of female sitters that he characterised by their ethnicity or nationality, such as Indian Girl(1941), Irish Girl (1941), Spanish Girl (1957) and A Ceylonese (1957), which were all exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Painted shortly after the arrival in Britain of 492 migrants from Caribbean countries on board the MV Empire Windrush in June 1948, Mason’s painting invites consideration as a response to this landmark moment in British history.