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A Man of Parts and Learning Fara Dabhoiwala on the Portrait of Francis Williams

The only certainty about the picture is that it shows Francis Williams. No one has ever been able to discover who...

A celebrated late portrait, of which several versions were made, showed Newton seated in his study, surrounded by all the standard pictorial conventions symbolising his distinction as a man of learning – a bookcase full of weighty tomes, a table and a large chair, a celestial globe – and, open in front of him, the third and final edition of the Principia. It’s also notable that his unpublished novel, The Journal of Penrose, excoriated slavery, extolled the equal humanity of ‘negroes’ and white people and included Indigenous, African, Black and mixed-race characters, such as the aged fugitive Quammino, who had fled his long and brutal West Indian enslavement. Because he was part of an enduring family dynasty, held public office, became the head of a university and didn’t live on a hurricane-prone West Indian island – but above all because he was a powerful white man – many of Stiles’s papers have survived, and we can reconstruct a huge amount about his life and outlook.

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