U.K. Museum Races to Acquire 18th-Century Portrait of Black Gardener

The Garden Museum in London launched a campaign to purchase the earliest known portrait of a Black British gardener. The target is $560,000 to keep a rare 18th-century painting in a public U.K. collection. The painting, created in 1754 by an unknown artist, depicts John Ystumllyn, a renowned gardener who lived and worked in Wales. The portrait shows him elegantly dressed in a blue suit and waistcoat. The museum has held the painting on loan since 2023 and aims to display it permanently alongside another related portrait acquired in 2013. Most biographical details come from an 1888 account by Robert Isaac Jones, based on family knowledge, describing John’s abduction from West Africa, training by the Wynn family, marriage, children, and later work as a steward and gardener.

"The Garden Museum in London has launched a campaign to buy the earliest known portrait of a Black British gardener. The museum hopes to raise $560,000 to keep the rare historical record in a public U.K. collection. The prized 18th-century painting by an unknown artist, depicts John Ystumllyn, a renowned gardener who lived and worked in Wales. When he sat for the portrait in 1754, John was in his late teens, and is shown elegantly dressed in a blue suit and waistcoat."

"The painting has been on loan to the Garden Museum since 2023, but the institution hopes to see it permanently installed beside Portrait of a Black Gardener, another 1905 portrait by Harold Gilman that it acquired in 2013. "The Garden Museum celebrates the heroes and heroines of British gardening," said the museum's director Christopher Woodward. "John Ystumllyn should also be one of our heroes, and it would be a privilege to share his story.""

"Most of what we know about John is derived from a biography written in 1888 by Robert Isaac Jones, whose source was his grandfather, who had known John. Born in 1736, John was abducted from West Africa by slave traders when he was just eight years old. He was taken to the Ystumllyn estate in Criccieth by the Wynn family, who trained him in horticulture and employed him as a gardener. He excelled, and was recorded as working "more or less perfectly.""

"Jones described John as "handsome," and claimed that many local women competed for his affections. He eventually met Margaret Gruffydd, another worker on the estate, and the pair ran away from Ystumllyln to get married in 1768. The couple had seven children, of which five lived to adulthood. Some of their descendants still live in the region today. Having lost his job after eloping, John worked as a land steward on the nearby farm of Ynysgain Fawr."

Read at Artnet News