The Ambassador from Tunis with His Attendants as He Appeared in England in 1781

In 1781 London was a city at war. Britain was fighting the American colonies, France, Spain and the Dutch Republic at once, and Benjamin West, born in Pennsylvania, was history painter to George III. That year an envoy from the Bey of Tunis was in England, and West painted him with his household, as the long title puts it, as he appeared in England in 1781.

The ambassador is the old man at the centre, white-bearded, in a fur-lined robe with a yellow shawl drawn over his head. Around him stand his attendants in turbans and long cloaks, and among them a Black servant in a red cap. On the left is a young man in a tall black fur hat and a red robe, gesturing towards the ambassador. West did not paint an English street. He put the party on a sandy shore, with ships and a round fortress on the water behind them.

The canvas is less than a metre wide, a record of faces and clothes rather than a state portrait. West kept it. It was still among his own pictures when they were auctioned in London in 1829, nine years after his death, and the museum bought it in 1955.