Why Born Enslaved!

The identity of the Black woman who posed for this sculpture is unknown, but recent scholarship suggests that she might have been born into slavery in the French Antilles and, following her emancipation, migrated to France. Created twenty years after France abolished slavery in 1848, and only three years following emancipation in the United States in 1865, the bust was meant to appeal to the antislavery views of a progressive white audience. Yet despite its sensitive portrayal of an individual, the bust nonetheless objectifies the Black female body as an exoticized other, her single bare breast a symbol of both liberty and colonial fantasy.

This woman was also the model for the allegorical figure of Africa on a large fountain representing the four continents that Carpeaux designed for a park in Paris. This plaster is one of the independent sculptures he made based on that figure.