![]() There’s nothing you can do to change the past…but you can be active in the present.” But in this, I don’t feel responsible-but I feel accountable…. I think you need to take responsibility for your own actions. “I don’t feel that feeling guilty for something that you have no involvement with is a helpful emotion. “Not in a personal way,” Lascelles replied. “Do you feel any guilt or shame?” Harewood asked Lascelles. It’s like a monument to white supremacy,” he said as he arrived, in a documentary that recorded the event, 1000 Years a Slave. In 2019, Harewood journeyed back to the estate. A few years ago, through a genealogist in Barbados, he learned the truth: His paternal great-great-great-great-grandparents had been enslaved at a Lascelles plantation. He thought it was a coincidence that he shared a name with the estate. ASHLEY KARREL.īorn in Birmingham to immigrants from Barbados, Harewood had visited Harewood in his youth. “We wanted to take a little of that power away from Edwin,” a curator told me.ĭavid Harewood's Missing Portrait, 2023. The life-size bare canvas now is mounted directly onto a plain backdrop at eye level labels highlight the various techniques Reynolds employed to construct a picture of wealth, status, and power. As part of it, Edwin’s portrait has been taken down from its customary pride of place high above the mantel in the ornate Cinnamon Drawing Room and stripped of its regal gilded frame. “Suddenly, it seemed obvious we needed to do something to adjust that.”Ĭurrently, a special exhibition, “Reframing Reynolds,” is examining those family pictures. The collection was “fantastic,” Howse says, but “it struck me they were all of wealthy white men,” the countess adds. The walls of Harewood-adorned also with outstanding portraits by Old Masters, including Titian and El Greco-look different now too. “Our feeling is, just keep talking about it.” “It’s something so many people are terrified about,” says the earl. “They’re the most vociferous people in England,” an acquaintance said of the couple. The Earl and Countess of Harewood emerged as the most vocal country house owners on the subjects of slavery and colonialism-to the discomfit of some of their peers who preferred to keep quiet. Members of the African Caribbean population in nearby Leeds-who had rarely visited Harewood before “because they knew the history,” according to Lascelles-were invited to participate in performances, educational workshops, exhibitions, and other programs. The documents discovered in 1998 were conserved, digitized, and made available online. (Lascelles’s godmother and first cousin once removed was Queen Elizabeth.)Īs 2007 approached-the bicentennial of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act-the earl and countess went into action. In May 2005, the monument was consecrated in a ceremony attended by a cross section of the local community, plus Prince Charles. The crew spent four months at the estate, building a stupa with a team of Yorkshire craftsmen, using stone from the estate. None of them spoke English they had never traveled by plane before. He brought a master stupa builder and three monks from Bhutan to Harewood. ![]() If he built a stupa at Harewood, Lascelles wondered, could it have a similar effect? The religious monuments are often built with the intention of calming turbulent forces and bringing harmony to their environment. He traveled to Bhutan, visiting various stupas in the Himalayas. Reeling, Lascelles leaned into his long-standing interest in Buddhism, which he believes helps people see things as they truly are. “I said, ‘We’ve got to find out more about this.’ ” “It was a catalyst-a turning point,” he recalls. But in 1998, in a basement at Harewood, he discovered metal boxes full of documents-including ship manifests and deeds of plantations-that made plain his family’s past as enslavers. ![]() Most of the Lascelles family’s West Indian papers were housed in the London offices of their onetime partners and destroyed in a World War II bombing raid, recounts the earl.
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