Monsieur de St. George

The Chevalier de Saint-Georges was one of the most accomplished musicians and athletes of his generation. Born on the West Indian island of Guadeloupe to an enslaved Black mother renowned for her beauty and a white French plantation-owner father, he was taken to France as a child to be educated. At thirteen he entered the Royal Polytechnic Academy of Weapons and Riding in Paris and soon developed into a champion fencer. This mezzotint responds to a London visit of 1787, made at the invitation of the fencing master Henry Angelo, where Saint-Georges participated in exhibition matches. During his stay, he was painted by the American artist Mather Brown and this print reproduces that now lost painting. Verses in the lower margin, by the subject's former teacher Nicolas Texier de La Boessiere (1723–1807), praise the subject as a master fencer, accomplished musician, renowned swimmer, runner, skater, boxer, horseback rider and sharp-shooter–in sum, a modern Hercules.
Today, Saint-Georges is celebrated as the earliest European musician and composer of African descent to receive widespread critical acclaim. He became a concertmaster and was nominated, but denied, the position of conductor of the Paris Opera. He composed works for stringed instruments and wrote operas, plays and ballets–accomplishments hinted at in Ward's print by the sheet music and violin in the background. While in London, Saint-Georges is also believed to have collected books and pamphlets by English abolitionists for his friend Jacques Pierre Brissot (1754-1793), a Parisian journalist who was organzing a new Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of Friends of the Blacks) to advocate for the abolition of slavery in France.