Meet Eleonora Susette. After six years of research that ranged from botany to genealogy, the Art Gallery of Ontario has identified the sitter of an unusual 18th-century portrait it bought at auction.
A self-confident figure in opulent dress, holding an orange blossom and calmly meeting the viewer’s gaze, Eleonora is not presented as servile, nor as a curiosity or sexual object, as was so often the case when Black servants were included in family portraits in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Intrigued by the portrait of the young Black woman, the AGO acquired the painting in 2020 to add more multicultural context to its collection of historic European art. The auction house, Sotheby’s, had identified the work as Portrait of a Lady Holding an Orange Blossom but provided no additional information.
The Art Gallery of Ontario bought Portrait of a Lady Holding an Orange Blossom in 2020.Supplied
So who painted the lady? When and where? And, most important of all, who was she? Adam Harris Levine, the AGO’s associate curator of European art, got to work and consulted two colleagues: Monique Johnson, a former AGO European curator who now teaches at York University; and Charmaine Nelson, a Canadian who researches Black visual culture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Levine also crowdsourced the problem, sharing the picture online. Suggestions poured in, most of them related to previously known Black Europeans, but none of them fit the bill.
“It did speak to this heartfelt and earnest desire to restore an identity to our sitter,” Levine said as the research was unveiled to the media Friday.
Levine lead a cross-disciplinary team effort that can now reveal with certainty that Eleonora, born around 1756, was an enslaved woman, perhaps of mixed race. (Her last name, however, is unknown.) She was the family servant of Dutch colonists in what is now Guyana, and she accompanied her widowed mistress back to Amsterdam to help with a baby on the sea voyage. Once in Europe, Eleonora was painted by the portraitist Jeremias Schultz, probably to produce a keepsake because she had to return home after a few months.
All of that info came together slowly, piece by piece, over six years.
Fight at the museum: Sasha Suda and the legal battle at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
For starters, AGO conservator Maria Sullivan judged the portrait to be in excellent condition: Clearly it had been a prized possession that was well-cared for.
And Royal Ontario Museum botany curator Deborah Metsger confirmed that the original title was not incorrect: Eleonora is holding an orange blossom and that’s a potted orange tree behind her. The white of the blossom may suggest the young woman’s virginity, but it may also be a reference to the House of Orange, the royal family of the Netherlands – and thus a clue to the location.
From a partial signature on the painting, Levine was able to identify the artist as Schultz, a German-born painter who worked in Amsterdam. He also found a companion portrait of a well-dressed young Black man by the same artist in old auction catalogues.
The whereabouts of that painting are unknown – Levine hopes it may yet resurface – but the pairing suggested to the curators that they could be dealing with an engaged couple’s betrothal portraits.
Meanwhile, textile and fashion historians Alexandra Palmer and Ingrid Mida were able to date the painting to between 1770 and 1775 because of details in the blue silk gown. As the Enlightenment began, women’s clothing was made of lighter fabrics; Eleonora is wearing a dress of satin or taffeta silk. It might have been lent from the family or the artist for the occasion of the portrait – or, as Palmer explained Friday, it might simply have represented a sort of livery, a way for the family to indicate their own status by dressing their servants well.
“It really denotes she was very highly thought of and dressed beautifully in the height of fashion,” Palmer said.
Art Gallery of Ontario scores major donation including pieces by Warhol, Lichtenstein
So, by 2024, Levine knew he had a 1770-75 portrait painted in Amsterdam by Schultz. But as to the identity of the sitter, he had reached a dead end.
However, two years ago, he was contacted by two listeners of the podcast he had launched about the painting: Tim de Jonge and Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen, a son and mother from the Netherlands. They had done some research on Schultz because he was a distant ancestor and they had inherited some of the artist’s paintings of his own relatives.
At first the conversations covered Schultz’s career, but as they discussed the family portraits, they realized that Nieuwenhuijsen’s genealogy might hold the answer to the AGO’s mystery.
Nieuwenhuijsen is a direct descendant of Beata Louise Schultz, the wife of Stephen Hendrik de la Sablonière, who was governor of the Dutch colony of Berbice in what is now Guyana. Beata was the artist’s cousin, and she commissioned him to paint portraits of her and her husband before they left for the Caribbean. The governor died in Berbice, as did several of their young children, and the widowed Beata returned to Amsterdam with a baby in 1774.
When Nieuwenhuijsen began looking in Dutch archives, she found that previous historians’ accounts of the ship’s log had left out two passengers accompanying the new widow: Eleonora Susette, a nanny for the baby, and Michiel, the dead governor’s valet. Voilà, here were the two young people in the portraits – not a betrothed couple nor, as far as anyone knows, related to each other.
“It was actually their ancestry research that unlocked who this woman was and why she sat for this portrait,” Levine said.
Consulting Mark Ponte, a Dutch archivist, Levine also learned that while slavery was legal in the Dutch colonies, it was not in the Netherlands. An enslaved person brought to their owner’s home had to be granted liberty within a few months.
So Eleonora and Michiel, whose last name also remains unknown, show up alone on a ship’s log in 1775. Despite her evident status with the family, she was sent back to slavery in Berbice, leaving behind her mistress – and her portrait.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Eleonora Susette as ‘Susette’ on second and subsequent reference. Both ‘Eleonora’ and ‘Susette’ are her given names; her last name is unknown. This version has been corrected.