“It’s all there, thoughts about race, masculinity, femininity, what it is to be human and in the world alongside everyone else. But it is complex, joyful, miserable, infuriating, and over-whelming—so not easily put into words. That is why it is painted. The marks, the light, the dark, the color, the composition, the form, the scale: all of these things take on meanings to me, like a language to speak. And beauty is there too, unabashed and brazen.”

—Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Widely celebrated for her ability to evoke stillness and psychological depth, British-Ghanaian artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye reimagines the conventions of portraiture with a distinctly contemporary sensibility. Her oil-on-canvas paintings engage deeply with the history of Western art while simultaneously pressing against its conventions. Executed in 2011, the year following her institutional solo debut at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, Brutality by Any Other Name exemplifies Yiadom-Boakye’s technical precision, painterly fluency, and virtuosic command of tone and color. Working on a monumental scale, Yiadom-Boakye draws on classical pictorial strategies to both inhabit and subvert the lineage of portraiture, creating a work that is at once grounded in tradition and radically reimagined. 

Composed with deliberate formal clarity, Brutality by Any Other Name presents four young women in a compressed, stage-like picture plane. This shallow space, evoking the flattened depth of Diego Velázquez or Édouard Manet, collapses distance and thrusts the figures forward, intensifying their presence. The work recalls Old Master compositions, particularly group portraits of the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age and early British modernity—such as Frans Hals’s The Regentesses of the Old Men's Almshouse or the genteel Conversation Pieces of Joshua Reynolds and William Hogarth. In these historical precedents, group portraits project cohesion through uniformity while registering individual identity through gesture and expression. Yiadom-Boakye mirrors this tradition but subtly undermines its ideological underpinnings. Her figures are not marked by title, social rank, or allegorical intent. Their roles are neither clear nor categorizable; their identities resist fixed interpretation.

“I’ve been influenced by historic painters who share a certain devil-may-care mode of working, who were not so concerned with formal perfection or academic rules but with the physicality of paint, the act of painting…”

—Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

This ambiguity is a key element of the painting’s effect. Roughly school-aged and dressed alike, the imagined women of Brutality by Any Other Name wear clothing reminiscent of uniforms—with starched white collars poking out at the tops of V-neck knitted sweaters and the same ochre-orange jacket draped over each of their arms—yet are untethered from any specific institutional setting. This repetition of costume does not impose hierarchy but amplifies individuality through nuanced variations in posture, bearing, and facial expression. Their direct gazes confront the viewer, not as an invitation to narrative or seduction but as an assertion of presence. This confrontational stance draws on a long tradition of female sitters who meet the viewer’s eye, from the portraiture of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres to Édouard Manet. Yet here, the mirrored stares diffuse singularity, forming a visual chorus rather than a solo. 

“I’ve come to realize that having a measure of uncertainty is vital to the way I work.”

—Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

The mood of Brutality by Any Other Name is one of restraint and psychological opacity. Yiadom-Boakye’s earthy palette—burnt umber, olive green, ochre—recalls the tones of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, though without their theatrical chiaroscuro. The figures are intimately rendered yet curiously remote—together, but self-contained. Golden highlights and deep purple shadows shape the sculptural folds of the cloth held by each girl, anchoring the composition. These folds echo classical drapery but resist emblematic clarity. Yiadom-Boakye’s deft treatment of fabric—and her tendency to let figures emerge from and dissolve into similarly toned backgrounds—reveals her exuberant engagement with paint. Through underpainting and layered color, earlier marks seep through as modulated hues and shadows, creating passages of abstraction that recall postwar painters like Mark Rothko and, as has been observed, “speak of a kinship with Paul Cézanne’s tablecloths or the two large pillows on which Édouard Manet’s Olympia rests.”ⁱ Ultimately, the artist explains, “all marks are there to support the figure… It’s a continuous preoccupation to achieve the right balance between the skin of the figure and the surroundings.”ii

Comparisons to late 19th- and early 20th-century painters such as John Singer Sargent are especially fruitful. Sargent’s Two Girls on a Lawn, ca. 1889 resonates in its presentation of ambiguous intimacy, narrative indeterminacy, and shared sensitivity to the fleeting, unspoken qualities of the everyday. Both artists employ a subdued palette—Sargent’s soft greens and sun-bleached whites echoing the quiet domesticity of the garden setting, while Yiadom-Boakye’s deeper tones generate a more earthy, contemplative atmosphere. What Sargent’s painting conveys through its quietude, and even its sense of muteness, finds resonance in Yiadom-Boakye’s quartet and the para-imaginary world they occupy. The women—or girls—in Brutality by Any Other Name are bonded by composition and proximity but remain emotionally opaque, their interiority carefully withheld. Yet the similarities ultimately underscore their divergence: Sargent’s subjects are rendered with observational clarity, anchored in a specific time, place, and social milieu. In contrast, Yiadom-Boakye’s imagined quartet exists outside time, their expressions charged with ambiguity and their presence unmoored from narrative context. Where Sargent records, Yiadom-Boakye invents—replacing biography with speculation, and transforming the portrait into a site of inwardness and possibility.

“I’ve always thought in terms of the mark-making as a language and the painting itself as a language; it was never about describing an idea, or describing a time, or describing a situation, but allowing for a language that speaks of a feeling, and a place, and a person, and a history and an existence in itself… Any form of explanation comes through sensation.”

—Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

This resonance extends further into American modernism. The stillness and sense of isolation in Brutality by Any Other Name echo, both tonally and atmospherically, the muted loneliness of Edward Hopper’s psychologically suspended visions of urban life, as seen in iconic works such as Nighthawks, 1942. Yiadom-Boakye’s figures are more physically proximate, they too are emotionally oblique—unreadable, present but unreachable. The setting itself is timeless and non-specific, suspended in imaginative space. As viewers, we are offered no clues to their identities, relationships, or purpose. The painting resists narrative closure, inviting us to linger in its ambiguity. 

Portraits of two or more subjects began emerging in Yiadom-Boakye’s practice around 2009, yet one consistent feature remains: gender mixing is virtually absent from her canvases. “The conventional male/female dynamic is complete… it’s a narrative that doesn’t interest me,” she has said.ⁱⁱⁱ Her focus, instead, is on camaraderie rather than romance. This sensibility is palpable in Brutality by Any Other Name, where the four young women convey a quiet solidarity—unified, but not uniform. Their body language is both guarded and open: arms crossed or held before them, chins slightly lowered, but meeting the viewer’s gaze with a spectrum of expressions, from coy restraint to wide, toothy grins. They seem to hover at the threshold of self-possession, projecting a kind of confident vulnerability that resists overdetermined narratives of innocence or defiance. Yiadom-Boakye has often emphasized that her figures are not exceptional, but familiar. “When the issue of color comes up, I think it would be a lot stranger if they were white. After all, I was raised by Black people... for me this sense of a kind of normality isn’t necessarily celebratory, it’s more a general idea of normality.”^iv Yet in the context of Western portraiture, that very normalcy becomes radical. In Brutality by Any Other Name, the act of representing Black life as self-contained, unknowable, and wholly sovereign becomes a quiet political gesture. The figures do not perform or explain themselves. They are simply, unmistakably, there.

“For Yiadom-Boakye’s people push themselves forward, into the imagination—as literary characters do—surely, in part, because these are not really portraits. They have no models, no sitters. They are character studies of people who don’t exist.”

—Zadie Smith

Novelist Zadie Smith, writing on Yiadom-Boakye, observes that “subtleties of human personality it might take thousands of words to establish are here articulated by way of a few confident brushstrokes.”^v In Brutality by Any Other Name, those brushstrokes conjure not a mimetic reality, but an imaginative one—a speculative, alternate visual grammar that renders Black life with grace, complexity, and ambiguity. In this, Yiadom-Boakye shares affinities with artists such as Noah Davis, Barkley L. Hendricks, Jennifer Packer, and Amy Sherald, all of whom center Black figuration in their work. But where others may draw from specific histories or social commentary, Yiadom-Boakye’s relationship to fiction and temporality sets her apart. Her subjects are not tethered to chronology—they are not historical, contemporary, or utopian. They occupy a timeless, imaginative space that honors painterly tradition even as it rewrites it. Brutality by Any Other Name is not merely a reclamation of the portrait genre—it is a reconstitution of it. Through Yiadom-Boakye’s confident hand, the painting opens up a space not just for representation, but for infinite possibility.

ⁱ Andrea Schlieker, “Quite Fires: The Paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye,” Isabella Maidment and Andrea Schlieker, eds., Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night, London, 2020, p. 12.
ⁱⁱ Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, quoted in ibid, p. 12.
ⁱⁱⁱ Yiadom-Boakye, quoted in conversation with Andrea Schlieker, October 25 2019, in Andrea Schlieker, “Quite Fires: The Paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye,” Isabella Maidment and Andrea Schlieker, eds., Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night, London, 2020, p. 16.
^iv Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, quoted in ibid.
^v Zadie Smith, “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Imaginary Portraits,” The New Yorker, June 12, 2017, online.