Historian: Paintings of Pringle should be destroyed

Historian Trevor Marshall says the 18th Century painting of Rachel Pringle, one of this country’s most famous early hoteliers, is a far cry from what the woman actually looked like and he wants all the copies destroyed.

 

Marshall told those attending the launch of Morris Greenidge’s novel ‘Just Call Me Madam’ –  which is focused on another hotelier of that time, Caroline Lee – that Pringle, who is believed to have lived 1753 and 1791, did not look like the elephantine Black woman she is depicted as in the portrait done by Thomas Rowlandson. He is resolute in his stance that Rowlandson’s painting, done after Pringle’s death, is despicable. 

 

“Those of you who have a copy of it, or have seen copies of it, join me please in either desecrating or burning every copy of that painting that purports to be that of Rachel Pringle,” he urged.

 

Marshall is adamant that Pringle did not look like the person in the painting, explaining that in her will she describes herself as a “free mulatto”, an indication that she was fair in complexion. 

 

“Yet Rowlandson painted a picture of Rachel Pringle five years after she died and made her into a retarded, coal-black mammoth like in that cornflakes ad… I call for the total burning of every picture of Rachel Pringle that exists in Barbados, because it is a vile portrayal of a woman who did not look like that. Not that there is anything wrong with black mammoths, but she was not like that,” the retired Head of History at the Barbados Community College maintained. 

 

Meanwhile, lauding Greenidge for bringing the story of Caroline Lee, Bridgetown and Barbados at that time to life, Marshall also praised him for not painting Lord Horatio Nelson, of whom there is a statue in Bridgetown, as a Barbadian hero. He noted that Greenidge is perhaps the first Barbadian Black writer to mention Lord Nelson in other than hagiographic terms. 

 

“Warren Alleyne mentions Nelson as the hero who saved Barbados from the French; Alvin Thompson blew that open, but Alvin is not Bajan born; Morris Greenidge takes Alvin’s lead and hits it over the boundary. He does not say like Trevor Marshall would, that it is a musty, stinking, frowsy lie, that Nelson saved Barbados from the French. But he shows that we should never again link the two terms – Nelson and the salvation of Barbados.”

 

Marshall, who has long advocated for the statue of Nelson to be removed from its place of prominence in Bridgetown, is suggesting that Greenidge’s writing lays the way open for the future generation to move that statue once and for all.

 

“I know they will once they read Morris’ book and the books of other people,” he stated. 

(JRT)