Jules

Painted in 1971, and held in the same private collection for over 50 years, Barkley L. Hendricks’s Jules is the first of four paintings in which the artist immortalized George Jules Taylor, a fellow student at Yale. In this bold and audacious portrait, Hendricks reverses centuries of art historical omission by giving his sitter—a proud Black man—a place in the art historical canon that had previously not been afforded his antecedents. Yet, Hendricks’s portraits go beyond mere representation, they are a partnership between artist and sitter to reflect, create, and develop an identity built on self-reliance and visibility. One of the artist’s most important series, the three other paintings of George Jules Taylor are all in major international museum collections.

Standing tall, with his hands confidently buried deep in the front pockets of his dungarees, the subject of Hendricks’s masterful portrait looks out directly from the surface of the canvas. Dressed in a bright yellow sweater, his denims held up by a pair of bold black-and-white suspenders, and wearing a large newsboy-style cap, the lithe figure of Jules twists and contorts to fit the confines of the canvas. Standing contrapposto, his confident stance confronts the viewer directly. Painted against a burnished bronze ground, attention is focused purely on the sitter, his engaging appearance and his dynamic personality. This combination of detailed figurative elements set against an unmodulated ground provides for an unmistakable message. As Antwaun Sargent notes. “the entire narrative of the painting is the fact of the subject’s existence, which is to say he painted these people because they existed” (quoted in A. Sargent, “Barkley L. Hendricks: To Be Real,” in A. Ng and A. Sargent, Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick, exh. cat., The Frick Collection, New York, 2023, p. 41).

The man Hendricks chose as his subject is George Jules Taylor (born Jules Easton Taylor), a student the artist met while they were both students at Yale. Hendricks was studying for his MFA, and Taylor was a first-year undergraduate, and they both signed up to take a class with the painter Bernard Chaet. Hendricks was immediately struck by his new friend’s height (he was 6’ 6,” compared with Hendricks’s 5’ 9”), his sartorial elegance, and distinctive persona. “[He was a] provocative subject matter for me,” Hendricks’s recalls, remembering how he looked like a “black Dracula who would float around campus barefoot” (quoted in A. Arabindan-Kesson, “The Painting,” Tate Gallery, online [accessed: 4/16/2026). For Hendricks though, portraiture was never a means of merely copying the corporeal world, it was a collaboration between artist and sitter to build up an identity. “Hendricks’s understanding of portraiture was…a process of identity creation, enacted collaboratively through the performance of the sitter and its interpretation by the artist… identity for Hendricks’s is a process of (ongoing) production” (ibid.).
image.png image.png Barkley L. Hendricks, New Orleans Niggah, 1973. National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, Wilberforce. © Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
During the course of the next few years, Hendricks would paint three other canvases featuring Taylor: George Jules Taylor (1972, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); New Orleans Niggah (1973, National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, Wilberforce); and Family Jules: NNN (No Naked Niggahs) (1974, Tate Gallery, London). All four portraits convey the power and presence that is inherent in Taylor’s nonchalant coolness that seems to emanate from deep inside, together with their developing friendship and familiarity over the course of the next few years. Their friendship would last until Taylor’s death in 1984.

Hendricks’s very contemporary portraits also take their place in the wider art historical narrative. On touring Europe in 1966 as a 21-year-old artist, Hendricks was struck by “how limited the representation of black figures has been in Western art history, and how few of those depicted have been truly harmonizing or personalized portraits” (quoted by A. Ng, “Barkley L. Hendricks and the Old Masters,” in A. Ng and A. Sargent, op. cit., p. 19). His response was to produce portraits that do not deal merely with color but, more fundamentally, with race. As Aimee Ng, curator of the critically acclaimed Hendricks’s exhibition at New York’s Frick Collection in 2023, noted, “Race is central to Hendricks’s practice…it is precisely who his subjects were, together with how he portrayed them, that electrified his art” (ibid., p. 21).

But ultimately Hendricks’s paintings are about people, and more specifically people he knew. Fellow painter Stanley Whitney (who was also immortalized on canvas by Hendricks) succinctly summarizes his friend’s legacy, “He wasn’t out to be revolutionary. He just wanted to paint people he loved…He wanted to see Black people exhibited in those museums” (S. Whitney, quoted in K. Crow, “The Friendship Behind a $5 Million Barkley L. Hendricks Painting,” Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2023, online [accessed: 4/16/2026]). So often a painter of the people in his life, Hendricks’s ultimate medium could be described as friendship itself.