The Sturge Portrait

Birmingham Art Gallery contains one of the few known oil paintings of Joseph Sturge. He is represented against a West Indies landscape; the artist of the portrait is as yet unidentified. The complex painting highlights Sturge’s identity as an antislavery campaigner, and is thought to commemorate the 1838 abolition of the ‘apprenticeship’ in the colonies.

Being a lifelong devoted Quaker undoubtedly had a profound affect on Sturge’s antislavery and humanitarian stance. He was buried in 1859 at the Bull Street Meeting House. He now rests at Lodge Hill cemetery, Selly Oak.

Exploring Joseph Sturge’s life today can open up many different perspectives on Birmingham’s social history. It allows us to reconsider the city’s long history of positive social engagement, alongside its more complex and contradictory attitudes towards justice, race, and freedom.

The year 2007 marks the two hundred year anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in the British Colonies. Sturge would argue that rather than ‘celebrating’ this date, we should use it to mark an ongoing commitment to social justice in Birmingham and around the world. An evangelical figure of national stature, Joseph Sturge should be remembered as a founding father of Birmingham’s social conscience.