Artist unknown, Qalasirssuaq [Erasmus Augustine Kallihirua]. 1832/5–1856. Dobbeltportrettet. Oil on canvas. 63.4 × 76.2 cm. BHC2813. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (BHC2813). 

This bust-length life-size (64 × 76 cm) painting of the young Inughuit hunter Qalaherriaq (d. 1856) belongs to the National Maritime Museum in London, where it hangs alongside paintings of Arctic explorers, landscapes and seascapes, artefacts connected to exploration and Inuit culture, and taxidermy specimens. Painted in the early 1850s, it is one of very few European paintings depicting the numerous individual Inuit who partook in exploration – as guides, translators, tailors, seamstresses, mapmakers, hunters, and more.  

This double portrait, showing the sitter en face and in profile, presents a highly unusual combination of traditional European portraiture and scientific imaging that speaks to the colonial context of Qalaherriaq’s life in British society. On the one hand, Qalaherriaq is presented as a gentleman who, with cut, combed hair and a European suit, assumes a confident posture and expression. He calmly meets our gaze, his expression suggesting a smile, and holds his left hand up in a lightly clenched fist. The overall impression – given by the left side of the painting, alone – is of a personal portrait of a family member or friend, intended for display in a middle-class British home. On the other hand, the use of two views (front and profile) presents a radical break with established conventions for official and personal portraiture. This double view invites a study of the sitter’s head shape and facial forms that resonates with scientific research and popular interest in the character and variety of non-Western peoples at mid-century and onwards. We see this again in the some of the late nineteenth-century photographs of Sámi that feature in Death Means Nothing for the Colours and Áillohaš's Beaivi, áhčážan, also in this exhibition. 

This scientific interest in recording the anatomy and colour of a living Inuit head through the hand of a professional artist complicates, or even negates, reading the painting as a personal or familial portrait capturing Qalaherriaq’s experienced identity and respecting his terms for self-representation. At the same time, the confident posture and smiling expression in the front view may also suggest that Qalaherriaq was knowingly performing the "ethnographic pose" the painter – and its commissioner – required of him. Moreover, the portrait points to further traces of Qalaherriaq’s life, agency, voice and aesthetic expression.  In addition to the Reverend Thomas B. Murray's (1856) memoir, Kalli the Esquimaux Christian, based on personal contact with Qalaherriaq and published the year he died, a handful of letters and drawings survive from Qalaherriaq's time in England and Newfoundland. Today kept in the Cathedral Archives in Canterbury and Derbyshire Record Office in England, Qalaherriaq's letters and drawings are important testimonies to his will to reflect on and express a subtle critique of his involuntary stay in British society, and to assert the continued importance of his Arctic homeland. The exhibition includes printed copies of five of his six drawings and one letter.  

Essay by Ingeborg Høvik and Axl Jeremiassen 

Read more in Høvik and Jeremiassen (2023), "Traces of an Arctic Voice: The Portrait of Qalaherriaq", Interventions, 25(7), 975–1003. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2023.2169626