This extraordinarily fresh watercolor of a young boy, perhaps five years old, is a rare, informal glimpse into the life of the Black community in nineteenth-century Britain. Like many English artists of the period, William Henry Hunt began his career making watercolor sketches of rustic landscapes, but in the 1830s he turned his attention more and more to the depiction of life in Britain’s economically and socially marginalized communities. Hunt was, for example, well known for his extensive network of friends among London’s street performers.

Hunt made a comparatively small group of studies of Black sitters, and this boy sat for the artist a number of times over the span of several years. This sketch is quick and lively, alternately built up with rich textures and quickly dashed off with sketchy lines. Small virtuosic touches, such as the dash of blue in the boy’s eye and the white highlights in his hair, shine through, revealing the command of the watercolor medium that made Hunt’s works so much in demand in the middle of the nineteenth century.

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