This is rare Black women and servants usually are dressed more simply in comparison, or dressed entirely in fantastical clothing that resembles Ottoman Turkish or Asian styles (Waterfield 144) (Fig. Everything else she wears is just as fashionable as what her companion wears, if not more. She also is the one with more lavish lace and jewelry – usually a symbol of greater standing – and the only indication of exoticism is her small matching turban. In the late seventeenth century, following the fashion set by Louis XIV when he built the giant orangery at Versailles, a demand for this delicate bloom was created among European society.” (14) Customarily a symbolic allusion to purity, marriage, and fertility, the tree is also evidence of the wealth and luxury that its cultivation required. “The decorative orange tree… is characteristically in fruit and flower at the same time. 3). In Masterpieces of American Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1986), Margaretta Salinger describes the symbolism: It is also the Black woman here who is depicted holding an orange and its blossom directly, rather than the white one (Fig. Both women are holding fruit, rather than having one gift it to the other as a sign of bounty and subservience (Waterfield 144). The agency and perspective in this painting seems to be the possessions of the Black sitter. And uniquely, the Black sitter in this image is looking at the viewer while the white sitter is looking over at her rather than also confronting the viewer (Fig. 3), this painting avoids almost all of them. While Dido’s painting feeds into old tropes of servant-and-master portraiture that the Wadsworth describes (Fig. 2) is also lauded as such, but this painting may actually be more representative of an equal or near-equal relationship. A similar piece dating to the 1760s of gentlewoman Dido Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray (Fig. We assert instead that this depicts a Black sitter treated as equal to a white sitter in an 18th-century continental European context. This seems to be a narrow reading of the painting. The plumed head band worn by the servant girl is a romanticized suggestion of ethnicity which differentiates race.” The setting in an enclosed garden, often with ‘antique’ props such as the grotto chair, and the gesture of offering fruit are common to this category of pictures. A number of English portraits from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries depict female subjects, particularly children, in the company of a favorite non-European servant. “Despite an apparent affection between these young women, the seated figure is clearly of privileged social status while her standing companion is a servant. The Wadsworth Atheneum’s “Curatorial Narrative” claims that the Black woman is a servant: The painting is referenced in books and online by two other names: between 1986 and at least 2003 it is cited as Two Women Gathering Fruit and before 2019 as Portrait of Two Society Women (Tortora 240, Lowery 224). This painting is currently titled Young Woman with Servant, but this seems to be a relatively new name with an updated description to support the renaming. Slaughter was most prolific in the 1740s. While there is no date given by the museum, from an analysis of the fashion (next section) we can tell that it probably dates to c. The 1745 portrait in figure 1 is a good example of this in his work the silk gown is carefully rendered while the faces are rather flat. “Slaughter’s figures tend to be stiffly posed, but he showed a facility for the depiction of costume… the ornate draperies of his sitters took precedence over any liveliness of gesture or expression.” In his biographical entry on Slaughter (2003), Shearer West notes: He returned to Britain for good in the late 1740s and was appointed Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, a position responsible for caring for and conserving the royal painting collection. Slaughter studied under Godfrey Kneller from 1712 and worked abroad in Belgium, France, and Ireland over the next several decades (West). This painting of two young women collecting fruit is attributed to English artist Stephen Slaughter (1697-1765).