Gabriel Manigault

Portraits of the South Carolina Manigault family patriarch and matriarch (28.126.2) by Charleston’s leading 18th-century painter, the Swiss-born Jeremiah Theus, document two centuries of aristocratic privilege as well as the material afterlives of what made it possible. Son of a French Huguenot merchant, Manigault was considered the wealthiest man in colonial South Carolina, who supported the revolutionary cause with his private fortune derived from rice plantations run by slave-labor. He reportedly counted nearly 300 enslaved individuals as his property at one time.

These works also hold a history of the family’s declining fortunes post-emancipation. In 1867, a descendant, Charles Izard Manigault, recorded how the paintings were defaced (see black-and-white images), likely after their removal to the family’s Silk Hope plantation for safe-keeping during the Civil War. Recent scholarship has proposed this deliberate disfigurement of the canvases as acts of iconoclasm and rebellion by formerly enslaved residents of Silk Hope.