In John Singer Sargent’s creations, African-American bellhop Thomas McKeller appears as classical gods and goddesses in a mural in the rotunda of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; as a World War I soldier in a stairwell of Harvard University’s Widener Library; and as the body in a portrait of A. Lawrence Lowell, an early-20th-century Harvard president.
But McKeller never appears as a black man. Rather, in all these significant works, his body becomes that of a white man, a god, even a Native American leader.
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