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Drawing on her wealth of experience and expertise in using visual sources in the classroom, in this article Jane Card explores how a single painting, a portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, might form the basis for a sequence of lessons. Arguing that although highly accessible, images are not straightforward windows into the past, Card demonstrates the vital importance of rich contextual knowledge if teachers are to plan an indepth enquiry based on a single visual source, and if students are to be able to interrogate in a meaningful way a visual image as a source of evidence. Card describes a number of strategies to help students do this and in so doing shows how a sustained focus on a 'little picture' across a sequence of lessons can help students to see a 'big story'.
Media reviews of the film Belle, directed by Amma Asante, have drawn attention to the double portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Elizabeth Murray.1 This was once, but no longer, thought to be by the society painter Zoffany, and is currently in Scone Palace, Perthshire, in the Earl of Mansfield Collection. Dido was a mixed-race girl brought up in the British aristocracy of the late eighteenth century. Images reflect the social customs and attitudes of the society in which they are produced and this double portrait is interesting because it was painted at a time when Britain participated in the trade in slaves. While Dido's portrayal to some extent reflects the conventions for painting exotic' people, in other ways it is unusual. Does it indicate the unique circumstances of one girl - or does it reflect the stirrings of a change in racial attitudes?
It is essential when asking such questions of a visual source to give pupils thorough contextual information. All images retain degrees of ambiguity, and we cannot cross-examine the patron and artist who created an historical image as to their purposes and intended meanings. Furthermore, images are not straightforward windows into the past: they are constructions showing what the patron wished to be shown. Artists deployed visual codes, symbols and conventions particular to their own time. The original viewers perceived the image through their own cultural...