Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit is an important artwork, yet the artist and sitter remain unknown. Many people have tried to identify both with little success. Initially the painter was thought to be the great Plympton-born artist Sir Joshua Reynolds, however this was refuted in 1969. During the 1960s historians speculated that the sitter was Olaudah Equiano; this was believed up until 2006 when John Madin proposed the identity of the sitter to be Charles Ignatius Sancho and the artist to be Allan Ramsay.

In 2019, the actor Paterson Joseph dismissed these theories. Joseph cited the attribution as an example of the whitewashing of African-Britons from the record of British art history, suggesting scholars lazily returned to the same few notable black figures in 18th-century Britain when there were many others who might be the individual in RAMM’s portrait. Scholars have taken an interest in the painting in recent times including attempting to understand what portraits such as this one can tell us about black history.

During this same period, a thread on the Art Detective website was taking place with art historians attempting to identify both the artist and the sitter. However, it came to the same conclusion, with no one able to correctly identify either. Despite this, the painting remains widely reproduced as Equiano, even if authors, historians and publishers subsequently acknowledge it’s probably not actually an image of him. As recently as 2022, the painting was identified as potentially being of Olaudah Equiano in the history podcast You’re Dead to Me. This debate has been detailed by Melissa Percival in her journal article “Decolonial practices around “Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit” (formerly “Portrait of an African”), in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), Exeter”.

Before it was exhibited at the Royal Academy, in January 2024 ‘Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit’ was taken to London’s Courtauld Institute of Art where the painting went through infrared and digital X-Rays, UV scanning, XRF pigment analysis and microscope photographs. While we are awaiting a full report, any analysis is so far inconclusive. We do know that no signature was found in the work. Under UV lighting, it is possible to see a clear line on the neck which indicates that it was painted during two separate campaigns of painting.