Art Gallery of Ontario Identifies Enslaved Sitter in 18th-Century Dutch Portrait After Six-Year Research Effort
When the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) bought an unsigned, unidentified portrait at Sotheby’s in 2020, the Toronto museum was taking a calculated risk. The painting showed a young Black woman in pearls and slate-blue silk, holding a small spray of orange blossom beside a potted orange tree. With no confirmed sitter, artist, or date, the work entered the collection under a deliberately provisional name: “Portrait of a Lady Holding an Orange Blossom.”
Now, after years of multidisciplinary research and an unexpected assist from family historians in the Netherlands, the AGO has identified the sitter as Eleonora Susette (b. 1756), an enslaved woman who was brought from the Dutch colony of Berbice (in modern-day Guyana) to Amsterdam in the 1770s and later forced to return across the Atlantic.
The acquisition was part of the museum’s effort to broaden the narratives embedded in historic European art. “We look at Europe in a global context and we like to highlight the ways that European artists and collectors traveled and traded with the world. Part of that is representing the people who lived in Europe but came from abroad,” Adam Harris Levine, the AGO’s associate curator of European art, said in an email.
Early research clarified what the painting itself suggested. Conservators and scholars confirmed the sitter is holding orange blossom, visually echoed by the orange tree behind her. The motif may allude to the House of Orange, a symbolically charged reference in the Netherlands that can also be read against the era’s commercial and colonial networks. Costume specialists then narrowed the date: details in the blue silk gown point to a window between 1770 and 1775.
Attribution followed. A partial signature indicated “Schultz,” and the AGO team initially considered Johann Cristoffel Schultz, an engraver and the nephew of the painter they were seeking. But a closer comparison shifted the credit to Jeremias Schultz, a Berlin-born artist who found success in the second half of the 18th century painting Amsterdam’s merchant class. Signatures on two works at the Museum de Waag in Deventer matched the AGO portrait.
A further clue surfaced in an old auction catalogue: a companion portrait of a young Black man in a rich green suit with a lace cravat. The figure was later identified as Michiel, and the pairing suggested the sitters’ presence in Amsterdam was tied to the Dutch colonial world.
Even with these pieces in place, the human identities behind the images remained elusive. Levine described the search as a near standstill. “We were looking for two young people of color who were living in Amsterdam in the 1770s,” he told the AGO’s magazine Foyer. “That, frankly, felt like a complete dead end to me.”
The breakthrough arrived via email. Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen and Tim de Jonge, a mother-and-son genealogy team in the Netherlands, contacted the museum after hearing the AGO podcast “Portrait of Possibilities,” which traced the ongoing investigation. While researching their own family history, they encountered archival material that connected directly to the painting.
Their ancestor, Beata Louise Schultz, was the painter’s first cousin. She moved to Berbice in 1768 after her husband was appointed governor. Records show that after her husband died in 1773, Beata prepared to return to Amsterdam and wrote to the Dutch government requesting permission to bring two enslaved people from her household: Michiel and Eleonora Susette. Archival documents also note that Eleonora Susette had been forced to work alongside her mother, Lucia Afiba.
Back in Amsterdam, Beata commissioned her cousin to paint portraits not only of her own son and daughter, but also of Michiel and Eleonora Susette. The AGO has suggested the images were likely intended as keepsakes. Eight months later, Michiel and Eleonora Susette were sent back to Berbice.
The identification does not resolve every question the painting raises, but it sharpens what the portrait can now be asked to carry: not simply the aesthetics of 18th-century Dutch portraiture, but the lived reality of coerced movement, domestic servitude, and colonial power that made such images possible. Levine has argued that the research should also widen art history’s focus. “For a long time, art historians have drawn our attention to foreign objects in Dutch still life compositions,” he said. “But it is important to think about this cultural context beyond the material and to think about peoples’ lives.”
For the AGO, the result is a rare instance in which a museum’s provenance and attribution work has restored a name to a face long treated as anonymous — and reframed a seemingly conventional portrait as evidence of the Dutch Atlantic world.
