How Kerry James Marshall Foreshadowed His Phillis Wheatley Portrait

In the lower left corner of Kerry James Marshall’s Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776 (2007), we see a sketch of Phillis Wheatley. Now, given the release of the Black Heritage Series Phillis Wheatley stamp derived from Marshall’s 2022 image, that earlier sketch reads like foreshadowing.

Within the context of Marshall’s imagined portrait of Moorhead, the sketch of Wheatley appears to be drawn by Moorhead himself. The widely distributed frontispiece of Wheatley is thought to be based on a drawing attributed to Moorhead, and in that familiar image we see her in profile. The sketch inside Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776, however, shows Wheatley facing forward.

Fifteen years after placing Wheatley as a background sketch, Marshall moved her to the foreground in his Phillis Wheatley-Peters (1753 – 1784) African Poet in America (2022). In this later rendering, Wheatley appears slightly older than in the 1773 engraving, and her right hand, rather than her left, rests against her face. Just as important, the woman pictured looks more assertive and self-possessed than in the widely circulated profile image of Wheatley.

It is also worth noting that Marshall dates his imagined portrait of Moorhead to 1776, three years after the portrait he supposedly created of Wheatley and after she gained her freedom following the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. In the imaginative world Marshall constructs, perhaps Wheatley returned for another portrait, this time as a free woman. 

Related:

• Phillis Wheatley, Scipio Moorhead, and Amiri Baraka

• Wheatley, Moorhead, Marshall, and Intersections of Art & Poetry