A Depiction of Mary Sabina

This painting depicts Mary Sabina, a so-called dappled negro girl who was born in 1736 on a Jesuit plantation in Cartagena, on the northern coast of Colombia, South America. Both her parents were enslaved. Sabina probably had a skin condition, now known as vitiligo, which causes sections of the body and hair to lose pigment. Skin anomalies such as this one added to the scholarly debate over the question of whether different races were separate species. As early as 1697 William Byrd II presented his ideas on the subject to the Royal Society in London. In the 1780s and 1790s the question was taken up by the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, with Thomas Jefferson stating his opinions on the subject. The original painting of Mary Sabine was en route to England when it was captured by French pirates and brought to Europe. Several copies of it were made, including this one, and an engraving of the young girl was published in George-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffons multivolume work of natural history, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749-1804), a widely influential work by Europes preeminent naturalist.