Phillis Wheatley, Scipio Moorhead, and Amiri Baraka

After writing about the Phillis Wheatley stamp based on Kerry James Marshall's drawing, which invokes a drawing attributed to Scipio Moorhead, I thought about Wheatley’s poem “To S. M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works” (1773), which is regularly described as one of the earliest known poems by an African American dedicated to an African-descended visual artist.

So many artistic contributions by African Americans from the eighteenth century have been lost to history that we must necessarily refer to Wheatley’s poem as one of the first known or only surviving tributes. But it is not difficult to imagine other Black people, even those preceding Wheatley, who wrote about, painted, sculpted, and sang about the beauty and wonders of Black creative production.

We might celebrate Wheatley’s tribute to Moorhead while at the same time expressing regret that we do not have more information about the painter. The only surviving evidence of Moorhead’s artwork is the frontispiece portrait of Wheatley appearing in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). That image, produced in London, is thought to be based on a drawing attributed to Moorhead.

In 2002, I had a chance to talk to Amiri Baraka about my experiences listening to recordings of jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler. Baraka informed me that what I was hearing were “ruins” or “rumors” of Ayler’s real sound. “What you heard were rumors. Rumors of what Albert sounded like live,” he said. “The recordings couldn’t capture his sound, his actual sound. So what you heard were ruins of his real sound.”

Following Baraka, Wheatley’s poem and the frontispiece for her book serve as pleasant and invaluable rumors of what Scipio Moorhead’s artwork really looked like.

Related:

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