The meeting of Johnny Hart and Banda

The title of this artwork was changed as part of our committment to remove offensive and discriminatory language from the collection.

This artwork depicts an imprisoned black woman being viewed by a white man. The title written on to our engraving is The Negress.

With further research we discovered the image was an illustration for Tapster’s Tapestry, a story written in 1938 by Alfred Edgar Coppard. We had no idea what the story was about. Reading a copy of the book in the University of Aberdeen’s library revealed the image was an untitled illustration of a scene where the ‘hero’ Johnny Hart meets Banda. Banda was being held captive alongside other people and animals.