Fictions of Freedom: An English Antislavery Novel and the Art of Jean-Étienne Liotard, "Le Peintre Turc"

ABSTRACT: This article examines Edmund and Eleonora (1797), a neglected English antislavery novel by Edmund Marshall, and its use of the art of Jean-Étienne Liotard and the Enlightenment philosophy of John Locke. Marshall's novel concludes with an imagined gallery of paintings by Liotard, depicting the members of an English community that is enriched by imperial trade and interracial and intercultural exchange. Drawing on Liotard's reputation, Marshall advances a sentimental antislavery grounded in sensuous experience, liberal empiricism, and interracial domesticity. The article argues that Marshall, drawing on Locke's empiricism and Liotard's hyperrealism, portrays interracial gift-giving, culinary exchange, and shared appreciation for art, music, and fashion as correctives to the Atlantic slave system. The article places Edmund and Eleonora —with its detailed verbal visualizations of Black bodies and its invocation of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding —alongside Liotard's portraits and self-portraits, which serve as models of cross-cultural exchange. The author engages art historical scholarship by Mary Sheriff, Kristel Smentek, and others to situate Liotard's interculturalism within Enlightenment aesthetics. While acknowledging the limitations of Marshall's liberal vision, with its imprecise and often naïve understanding of global commodity exchange, the article reveals how literary and visual forms together articulated a late eighteenth-century fiction of freedom premised on commerce, sensation, and interracial affinity.