Ignatius Sancho Painting

Luminous and gestural reinterpretation. Acrylic on canvas - 100 x 150cm Worldwide shipping. Writer, composer, shopkeeper and abolitionist, Ignatius Sancho was celebrated in the late 18th-century as a man of letters, a social reformer and an acute observer of English life. Ignatius Sancho was born on a slave ship in the mid-Atlantic. He was given to three sisters in Greenwich but ran away and became butler to the Duke and Duchess of Montagu. Here he indulged his passion for reading and writing. He was welcomed by London's literary and artistic set, and was painted by Thomas Gainsborough, although my version is based on an earlier portrait by Alan Ramsay also thought to be of Sancho. In 1773 he opened a grocery shop in Westminster with a legacy from the Duchess. He became the first African prose writer published in England. His Letters, released in 1782, were an immediate best seller.