Diallo



Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (Job ben Solomon)

William Hoare of Bath, 1733
Room 11
Lent by Qatar Museums Authority, 2010

Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (1701-1773) came from a family of Muslim imams in West Africa. In 1731 a case of mistaken identity led him to being taken into slavery and to a plantation in America. By his own enterprise, and assisted by a series of spectacular strokes of fortune, Diallo arrived in London in 1733. Recognised as a deeply pious and educated man, Diallo mixed with high and intellectual society and was bought out of slavery by public subscription. Hoare’s sensitive portrait of Diallo is the earliest known British oil portrait of a freed slave and the first portrait to honour an African subject as an individual and an equal. Painted at the time when there was a new interest in Islamic culture and faith in Britain, it offers a fascinating insight into the complexity of global issues in the eighteenth-century.

The portrait of Diallo will be on tour to the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, New Walk Museum & Art Gallery, Leicester and South Shields Museum & Art Gallery during 2012 and early 2013. (Actual dates to be confirmed.)  Venues will work with the portrait to highlight local collections, develop displays and initiate programmes of community participation relating to the portrait.