In London, Jemmy learned English, dressed as a gentleman, and was even presented to King William IV and Queen Adelaide. The third painting in the series condenses that transformation into an allegory: Jemmy appears duplicated at the centre of the scene — on the left in his Fuegian form, on the right as a civilised man, in European dress and top hat. Between the two, the gesture that organises the painting is enacted: Button crowns himself. The education is complete once it no longer needs the educator; it is the convert himself who consecrates his own conversion.
As in the previous chapter, the scene brings together figures drawn from European painting, modified to inhabit this other story: patriarchs, angels and scribes surround the coronation as though it were a biblical scene, while a Velázquez infanta looks on impassively from one side. The old man raising a finger to the sky repeats the pose of Jacques-Louis David’s Socrates (the teacher accused, precisely, of corrupting the youth), now embodying Charles Darwin.
The chapters of the series also answer one another: on the left, an angel comforts a downcast FitzRoy. It is Boat Memory, dead in the previous painting, returning with the wings the first scene had already foretold. The title names, in English, the equivocation running through the whole process: what London called education was also the dismantling of an identity, celebrated with all the pomp of history painting.
Gallery
