Researchers in the U.K. have identified the enslaved boy depicted in Joshua Reynolds's 1748 painting of Royal Navy lieutenant Paul Henry Ourry. For centuries known only as "Jersey," the boy has been identified as George Walker, also called Boston Jersey, through baptismal and admiralty records. Walker was baptized at age 15 in Westminster in 1752, served on HMS Monmouth and HMS Deptford, and was discharged in 1753, after which his fate remains unknown. The research, a collaboration between the National Trust, the National Gallery in London, and Royal Museums Greenwich, also used scientific analysis to reveal Reynolds's original compositional intentions.
This discovery matters because it restores a name and a partial biography to a person who had been reduced to a nameless accessory in a canonical artwork, challenging the historical erasure of enslaved individuals in Western portraiture. It also highlights how archival research and technical analysis can recover marginalized histories, prompting museums and institutions to reconsider how they present and contextualize such works. The project underscores a broader reckoning in the art world with the legacies of colonialism and slavery embedded in historic collections.