Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave

William Blake after John Gabriel Stedman

National Gallery of Art

This print depicts a woman with dark skin, her wrists bound together and tied to a tree branch at the top of the print. She stands on the tiptoes of one foot with her head thrown back, looking upward. She has short, curly hair, and she is nude except for a thin strip of torn white fabric around her waist. In the background there are four people holding whips or pointing upward. The ground appears to be dirt or low grass, and there is a hut in the distance on the right and a body of water on the left. The sky behind the woman is blank, off-white paper.