"Reframing Picton"

August 5 2022

The National Museum of Wales has hit on a novel way to display its portrait of Thomas Picton, a major figure in Welsh history who was also a nasty b*stard. As Steven Morris in The Guardian reports:

After months of consultation and anguished debate, the portrait has been hung not in the museum’s grand Faces of Wales gallery but in a modest side room, and is contained in a specially built travel case made of softwood and scraps of plywood, with a strut covering the figure’s bulging groin area.

It is surrounded by vivid descriptions of Picton’s brutal treatment of the people of Trinidad when he was governor at the turn of the 19th century, including the torture of Luisa Calderón, a 14-year-old girl of mixed heritage.

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