U.K. Museum Races To Acquire 18Th-Century Portrait Of Black Gardener

A London museum is trying to keep a little-known 18th-century portrait in public view, and in doing so, bring renewed attention to one of Britain's most compelling gardening histories. The Garden Museum is raising £420,000 ($560,000) to acquire a portrait of John Ystumllyn, believed to be the earliest known image of a Black British gardener.

The work, by an unknown artist, has been on loan to the museum since 2023. If purchased, it would remain in a public U.K. collection and be displayed beside Harold Gilman's Portrait of a Black Gardener, creating a dialogue between two images separated by more than a century but linked by subject and historical resonance.

Ystumllyn's life is known largely through an 1888 biography by Robert Isaac Jones, who drew on family testimony. Born in 1736, Ystumllyn was abducted from West Africa at age eight and taken to the Ystumllyn estate in Criccieth, where the Wynn family trained him in horticulture and employed him as a gardener. He was said to have excelled at the work, described in one account as working“more or less perfectly.”

The portrait itself dates to 1754, when Ystumllyn was in his late teens. His story also includes a marriage to Margaret Gruffydd in 1768, after the pair ran away from the estate, and the birth of seven children, five of whom lived to adulthood. Some descendants still live in the region today.

After losing his job following the elopement, Ystumllyn worked as a land steward at Ynysgain Fawr before later returning to the Wynn family, which gave him a cottage in recognition of his years of service. He died of jaundice in 1786 and was memorialized with a short verse by the poet Dafydd Sion Siams. The first line reads,“Born in India, to Wales I came,” a reminder of how his life was reframed, and sometimes obscured, in the historical record.

The museum's campaign is paired with a research project led by special projects officer Edward Adonteng. Ystumllyn's cultural afterlife has also grown in recent years: a rose variety in his honor was planted by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in 2022, and Lewis Hamilton referenced him through a flower-covered Burberry coat at the 2024 Met Gala. For the Garden Museum, the portrait is not only an acquisition target, but a chance to restore a fuller public memory of Black presence in British horticultural history.

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