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First Impressions of the Portrait of Sir John Chardin

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Camille Leadbetter tells the story of her first encounter with the portrait of Sir John Chardin, currently hanging at the top of the stairs in the History of Science Museum in Oxford. 

Hello! My name is Camille and I’m a History of Art Undergraduate at the University of Oxford.

Since the start of 2020, I have been researching the provenance and connotations of the portrait of Sir John Chardin that is currently placed at the top of the stairs in the History of Science Museum.

In this blog series, I will guide you through the process of my research and present you with the tools to reimagine this portrait and what it means in the contemporary age. 

I will also encourage you to develop and share your own thoughts about the portrait. 

I hope you enjoy! 

My first encounter with Chardin

I first came across this portrait during a trip to the History of Science Museum in Oxford with my cohort in the History of Art department.

It did not strike me as a particularly stunning or well executed work of art but its dominant positioning and frame demanded my attention as I ascended the stairs to the second floor of the museum. 

The eccentric frame that accompanies the portrait, complete with astronomical and navigational devices and spherical globe on the top, is carved in wood and painted bronze.

I did not recognise the man in the portrait, seated and staring out towards his audience with confidence, nor did I recognise the young black boy standing meekly behind him and holding up a 17th century map of the Middle East to which the seated figure points. 

There is no reference to the boy in the accompanying label. 

The Museum as a frame

As part of my Art History degree, I have studied the concept of the museum being as much a frame of an image as its physical frame. The art historian Paul Duro established that the positioning and whereabouts of a painting hold ‘institutional, ideological and perceptual’ connotations, all of which contribute to how a work of art is received by its viewer. 

Therefore, the museum and what it chooses to display can often have underlying effects on how its core values are characterised in the public eye.

Especially for a museum not specialising in art, choosing to show this as one of the only paintings on display to the public could be misleading about its curatorial mission. 

This project has involved giving the boy the thought and consideration he has not been afforded in the past — which is all the more crucial now in an age when the traditional museum role of gathering and displaying collections to be consumed and interpreted by viewers and conservators is now being reframed in the light of an evolving relationship between the institution and the contemporary public. 

Camille Leadbetter is a History of Art student at the University of Oxford.

Other posts in this series:

Beginning the Process of Decolonising the History of Science Museum’s Collection

Reframing the “Chardin” portrait

Beginning the Process of Decolonising the History of Science Museum’s Collection

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Rhiannon Jones, Head of Public Engagement and Programmes at HSM, introduces a new blog series from Art History student Camille Leadbeater, which will focus on decolonising the HSM Collection.  

On visiting the History of Science Museum I was struck by many things – the beautiful historic building, the extraordinarily rich and fascinating collection, and also a painting that hangs at the very top of the Museum.  

Immediately, the younger figure in this painting jumped out at me — a young black boy with a silver collar around his neck and what appears to be a tear on his cheek. 

When I read the label next to the painting, it makes no reference to this young boy.

Instead it talks about the white man next to him, Sir John Chardin, (1643–1713), who I presumed must be a famous scientist but is in fact a jeweller and travel writer.  

When I came to interview for my role in late 2019, I felt compelled to raise this painting and its place within the Museum. My nieces’ father is from Uganda, the eldest is four years old and if they were to come and visit me in my place of work how could I explain this painting to them? The only black person they would see would be what appears to be a slave; what kind of message would this send to them about their role in STEM?  

I was nervous, but suggested the painting’s removal in my interview and the panel challenged me to offer other solutions. As well as changing the interpretation on the label, I suggested having a similar-sized portrait of a modern scientist, such as Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, an inspiring black female scientist; even if the interpretation were changed my nieces would not yet be able to read that and it would be much more powerful to have a visual counterpoint.  

At the time I did not know how these suggestions were received, but I have since been told that it actually helped me in securing the role and that the Museum had already been discussing this painting. 

Since joining the Museum in December 2019, I have been passionate about starting a project around this painting to discuss its reinterpretation and its place in the Museum.

When I heard that an Art History student from Oxford had chosen to focus on this painting for her Object Essay, I was delighted. Camille Leadbeater has done brilliant work exploring the cultural and historical contexts surrounding this painting and seeking to answer the question of who this boy could be, foregrounding his story. She has brought her own story to bear on this, as a young black person, and has rightly challenged the Museum on the display of this painting.   

At HSM, we believe that museums have a responsibility to our communities and our shared history — we stand with Black Lives Matter. We acknowledge that Museums are not neutral spaces and we have much work to do in order to tackle structures of racial inequality.  

It has been heartening to see how the HSM Team has got behind this project. Now our Top Gallery is open again, we’re sharing this story with our visitors, showing how we are working to reinterpret this painting as part of our commitment to decolonise the HSM collection, and asking for their thoughts and feedback.

With this blog series, we want to start this important conversation about our collection with all of you.

I hope you will follow Camille’s journey of discovery and share your own thoughts with us.  

We would love you to:

Rhiannon Jones is Head of Public Engagement and Programmes at the History of Science Museum 

Other posts in this series:

Beginning the Process of Decolonising the History of Science Museum’s Collection

First Impressions of the Portrait of Sir John Chardin

A Spectrum symphony

Matt Westcott notes crop

It doesn’t often find its way into lists of the most influential books of the 20th century, but the ZX Spectrum BASIC programming manual has to be up there, for putting countless thousands of youngsters on the path towards a future career in computers.

Matt Westcott revisits this great work with a particular ambition in mind…

Everything about the Spectrum’s design invited curiosity about programming. Switching on the computer would drop you into the BASIC environment, where pressing a key would immediately produce a corresponding keyword like PLOT or NEW – all helpfully printed on the keyboard. Even if you were only there to play games, you still had to negotiate your way to typing LOAD “”, and get a taste of talking to the computer in commands. (If you could tell it to play a game, what else could you tell it to do…?) The Spectrum manual took this spark of curiosity and ran with it, giving its readers a gentle, accessible introduction to the world of programming.

The Spectrum and the manual

The Spectrum and the manual

Chapter 19 of the manual introduced readers to the Spectrum’s modest sound capabilities. A command like BEEP 1,0 would produce a single electronic tone from the Spectrum’s built-in speaker. String enough of these commands together, with different numbers corresponding to different note lengths and pitches, and you could pick out a melody, as the manual demonstrated with a few bars of a theme from Mahler’s first symphony (bearing a certain resemblance to Frere Jacques).

Assembling a complete tune like this was painstaking work, hunched over that rubber keyboard with a page of sheet music and a chart of note values – and so it was with a cheeky sense of humour that the author added an ‘Exercise’ at the end of the chapter:

Program the computer so that it plays not only the funeral march, but also the rest of Mahler’s first symphony

Programming the ZX Spectrum was painstaking stuff

Programming the ZX Spectrum was painstaking stuff

Even if anyone had the patience to attempt this back in the day, they would almost certainly have run into the Spectrum’s memory limitations. Feats of extreme patience were nothing unusual to Spectrum programmers, though: creating any kind of fast-paced arcade game meant leaving behind the friendly world of BASIC programming in favour of low-level machine code, where a simple programming error could crash the computer entirely and force the programmer to load their work in from tape all over again. In the early days, before programming tools had been perfected, entire games like Sandy White’s 3D Ant Attack were written entirely on paper and then keyed into the computer as thousands of hex codes…

Like the rest of us, those programmers moved on to better, faster, friendlier computers, and were probably quite glad to gain the conveniences of hard disks and real text editors. For hobbyists like me who still do Spectrum programming for fun, though, it’s the best of both worlds – thanks to those home comforts, the internet, and 30 years of accumulated knowledge about the Spectrum’s hardware, it’s possible to tackle these technical challenges without needing the patience of a saint. And that brings us to a December afternoon in 2014 at the Museum of the History of Science, where we’ll attempt to turn that jokey comment in the manual into a reality, and host a ZX Spectrum performance of Mahler’s first symphony.

Taking that challenge on today, we have the distinct advantages of an internet where classical music is readily downloadable in the form of MIDI files, and modern computers that can do the number-crunching to turn them into our desired format. Nevertheless, the resulting programs are things that someone could – in theory – have typed into their Spectrum back in 1982.

We’re doing it with a 21st century twist though: at the event I’ll be joined by Dylan Smith, creator of the Spectranet interface which plugs into the back of a Spectrum and allows you to hook it up to the internet. We’ll be using these interfaces to link up the Spectrums and allow them to keep time with each other. That way, we’ll be able to play not just the melody, but the whole orchestral arrangement – and hopefully, arrive at a result which does justice to both Clive Sinclair and Gustav Mahler!

See Matt program, perform, and conduct this incredible feat at our Geek Out! event on Saturday 6 December, 10am-5pm.

Matt Westcott is Oxford-based web developer, demoscener and Spectrum obsessive, dedicated to making technology do stuff that it patently shouldn’t.