Léon Herbo was born in Belgium and his enigmatic oeuvre would come to comprise portraits, history paintings, genre scenes, and Orientalist themes over the course of his career. After studying at the Académie des beaux-arts de Tournai and the Académie royale des beaux-arts in Brussels, Herbo would reject his academic training by becoming a founding member of L'Essor, which sought to rebel against the bourgeois and conservative ideology of the Academic establishment in Belgium. The group’s motto was 'Eigen Kunst, Eigen Leven' (‘unique art, unique life’), and they combined art exhibitions with lectures and music performances. Because they lacked a unifying ideology with which to unite the Realists and Avant-garde painters who wished to break away from the Academies, the group ultimately lost members to the newly founded society Les XX in 1883, which would come to be one of the most important artistic societies in Belgian art, after L'Essor’s Salon rejected Ensor's The Oyster Eater because of its impressionist style.
Herbo was perhaps most admired in his time as a portrait painter, and particularly regarded for his portraits of actors and actresses. Herbo seems to have been particularly interested in the theme of Othello and returned to it often, including a portrait of his wife reading the play as well as a portrait of her in the guise of Desdemona. This connection has given rise to the suggestion that the sitter in the present painting may be the great Shakespearian actor Ira Aldridge. Though Herbo would have been just 17 at the time of Aldridge’s death in 1867, Herbo was on occasion approached to paint posthumous portraits, including that of the Crown Prince of Belgium, Léopold Ferdinand, Count of Hainaut, who died in 1869, who the artist was commissioned to paint by Queen Marie-Henriette. Though Aldridge’s daughters did study as children in Belgium, no definitive link can be identified between Herbo and Aldridge. However, Aldridge was well-known throughout Europe and well-connected in artistic circles, having been rumored to be the sitter for John Simpson’s The Captive Slave (The Art Institute of Chicago), painted in support of the Abolitionist movement in 1827. As a Black public figure during the height of the Abolitionist movement, Aldridge would directly appeal to his audience after the close of his performances in support of the Abolitionist cause.
In 1852, after 25 years performing primarily in the UK, Aldridge chose Brussels to begin his triumphal European tour. From that point onward, he performed regularly in Europe, including performances in Ghent and Brussels toward the end of his life 1867. The pose in the present portrait bears a resemblance to the pose Aldridge struck in the widely circulated engraving of him in the role of Aaron in Titus Andronicus made at the time of his European tour, and it’s possible this image may have served as the basis for the present portrait.
Whoever the sitter is, the present work clearly represents an individualized portrait rather than a ‘type.’ Dressed in somber-hued, period attire which does not exoticize the sitter, and clearly emphasizing his interests in art and literature, this portrait represents an intentional counterpoint to the derisive stereotypes and caricatures which the popular media of the period generally used in depictions of Black people. This fascinating portrait’s appearance on the market will hopefully add to the scholarly discussions of the complex and multi-layered uses of oil portraiture among the vibrant community of free Black people in Europe during the 19th century.