Artist: William Thomas Williams, Sr.
Date: 1758
Museum: National Portrait Gallery (Washington, United States)
Technique: Mahogany Panel
Although small in stature, Quaker reformer Benjamin Lay loomed large in the emerging eighteenth-century antislavery movement. Having witnessed the horrors of slavery as a merchant in Barbados, Lay dedicated himself to abolitionism. In 1731, he set out for Pennsylvania, where he resumed his campaign against slavery, writing pamphlets and speaking out at Quaker meetings. At the time, members of the Religious Society of Friends, as Quakers are formally known, enslaved people and participated in the slave trade. Benjamin Franklin’s wife, Deborah, owned this portrait of Lay. Although Franklin was an enslaver, his printing shop had published Lay’s abolitionist tract “All Slave-keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates,” in 1738. Here, Lay stands before his cave-like home, holding a treatise “on happiness” by the English Quaker philosopher Thomas Tryon. Shortly before Lay’s death, the Philadelphia Society of Friends passed a resolution expelling members who traded enslaved people.
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