Ivory, Apes and Peacocks 

John Duncan painted 'Ivory, Apes and Peacocks,' a title taken from the Bible, at a time when Western society grappled with defining its relationship to the non-European world. The painting stages a procession, complete with an elephant and a camel, that showcases exotic, racialized figures. Duncan appears to be celebrating a kind of global bounty. Yet, there is a tension, even an unease. The figures feel less like individuals and more like generalized types—the “Ethiopian” holding a fan, for instance. The abundance, as the title suggests, is one of commodities, of things extracted and put on display. This makes it hard to ignore the colonial implications of such imagery. Duncan was a Scottish artist associated with the Celtic Revival movement, which looked to pre-industrial, Celtic culture for artistic and spiritual inspiration. "Celticism," as it's been called, imagined a kind of pure, pre-colonial identity. But it did so at a time when questions of national and racial identity were deeply fraught, and that tension, for me, haunts this painting.