English School, circa 1825

The River of Sierra Leone

細節
English School, circa 1825
The River of Sierra Leone
grey wash, unframed
11 7/8 x 18 1/16in. (30.2 x 45.9cm.)

拍品專文

The peninsula of Sierra Leone was first settled in 1787 by Captain Thomson with four hundred freed slaves and sixty Europeans, following a proposal to found a colony of liberated African slaves. Clarkson supervised the transport of over a thousand freed American black slaves from Canada (where they had taken refuge after the American war of Independence) to Sierra Leone and his secretary, John Beckett, executed a series of watercolours commemorating the arrival of the Nova Scotian fleet off Sierra Leone. The present work appears to be amongst a group of copies made after Beckett's original drawings.