Old Painting, New Narrative

In September 2025, Glasgow Life Museums redisplayed a portrait in the Glasgow Stories gallery of Kelvingrove. The portrait had long been displayed in the People’s Palace. Donated to Glasgow Museums in 1950 by John Duncan (a descendant of John Glassford), it depicts John Glassford with his family and a child whom he had enslaved. Glassford was one of Glasgow’s tobacco lords. These were merchants in the 1700s who made fortunes trading in tobacco, a crop dependent on the exploitation of enslaved people working on American and Caribbean plantations.

The presence of an enslaved child in the portrait was long rumoured. Some of those rumours suggested that he had been painted out of the portrait  to cover up the family’s connections to enslavement due to the strong support for abolition in 1800s Glasgow. Work by our conservators in 2007, as part of a project for the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, showed that the enslaved child was not painted over or covered up on purpose. The legend of the painted out enslaved person behind John Glassford could be dismissed, as gentle cleaning revealed that he had simply been obscured by centuries of dirt. 

There is lots we currently don’t know about the enslaved child – we don’t know his name, where he was born, how he was trafficked to Scotland, or the life he went on to live. Contrast this with the other children in the painting; we know their names and a lot more about their lives. Christian Glassford, one of the young girls in the portrait, would go on to marry James Hopkirk (whose father Thomas was also a tobacco lord), and their oldest son, also called Thomas, went on to play a key role in founding Glasgow’s Botanical Gardens. 

Glassford’s sons and daughters, like the enslaved child, were children at the time of the painting. However, unlike them, the enslaved child was not regarded as a child but as property, and that has come to define how he is remembered and acknowledged. In the 1700s the fact that he was a Black child meant it was legal and acceptable to enslave him and treat him as property. It can be easy to see him as an outlier, one child who had an awful thing done to them, yet in the wider history of transatlantic slavery his life and history is one of many. During the era of transatlantic slavery, a small number of enslaved people were trafficked to Scotland and, alongside the millions of other Black men, women and children who were enslaved, their histories and lives are often missing from historical records and archives. 

Those historical records that do highlight some of the experiences of enslaved people trafficked to Scotland mainly appear in databases such as  Runaway Slaves in Britain where acts of resistance are recorded via adverts placed in newspapers by enslavers attempting to recapture people escaping enslavement. The Glassford portrait is one of the few recordings of a Black person in 1700s Scotland, highlighting its importance as an artwork and piece of historical record. This made its potential for a redisplay and recontextualization significant, allowing us to question how we could see and think about the portrait differently – from the perspective of the enslaved person rather than their enslaver.

The project team working on this redisplay wanted to make the enslaved child the central focus and to explore the portrait from his perspective, helping to reframe the narrative which the painting has been explored through. With so little known about him, this raised a wide range of questions and challenges about how best to approach this. In figuring out our approach, a couple of workshops and discussions held with Glasgow City Council’s Anti-Racist Conversations in School group were key. The group is made up of secondary pupils from a range of Glasgow schools. In our discussions, we asked them for their thoughts on the painting, including what they would name it and what the enslaved child might say if he could speak.  The workshops and discussions were integral to shaping the interpretative approach for the redisplay. 

As initial work progressed on the redisplay, it became clear that the use of digital interpretation alongside text-based approaches would be integral. In working on the digital interpretation, we aimed to bring the discussions from the workshops to life and ask and engage visitors with some of the key questions that had come up there, and in our own discussions as a project team. This included conversations around why we know so little about the enslaved child, what he would say if he could speak to us today, and how we could give a voice to someone we know so little about. We decided to produce a short in-gallery film, with a young actor playing the enslaved child, to reflect on some of the questions his presence raises and reflect on how histories of enslavement, memorialisation and power intersect. 

The Glassford Family Portrait now hangs in Kelvingrove’s Glasgow Stories Gallery. The approach taken to its redisplay there builds on other work undertaken by Glasgow Life Museums in recent years to reframe narratives around slavery and empire and find ways to broaden those to include a wider focus on Glasgow’s connections to the British Empire and transatlantic slavery and the histories of peoples who were enslaved and colonised. This work continues to bring up questions around how power shapes our understandings of history and how this impacts our city today.