Painting: “Ethiopian Slave”

“Ethiopian Slave” by Leo Jahaan.
Oil on canvas, 2014.
120 cm x 90 cm.

“Ethiopian Slave”.  At first glance the subject appears to be an elegant and proud tribal woman, however her stern appearance and the scars on her face betray the fact that she is in fact a slave.  Based on an engraving from an encyclopedia published in 1875, the woman was being sold in Khartoum, a center of the slave trade in the Sudan region at the time.