Imagining Imperial Modernity in British Colonial West Africa: Gerald Spencer Pryse's Work for the Empire Marketing Board

This essay focuses upon images made by Gerald Spencer Pryse in 1927/28 that were the outcome of a commission from the British governments Empire Marketing Board for him to convey positively colonial West Africa as an integral element of a modern, economic empire. As this essay argues, though, his watercolours and lithographic posters fail to celebrate the regions imperially driven economic activity. Instead, they highlight West Africas natural aesthetic appeal, and, what Spencer Pryse believed to be, the heightened aesthetic perception of its indigenous population, to suppress, or negatively position, industrialized processes that had been introduced there. In valorizing West Africas exoticism, Spencer Pryse, however, ignored imperial modernities then being independently forged by some West Africans, and consequently, as this essay maintains, his images offer only a limited account of West Africas imperial identity in the late 1920s. © Association of Art Historians 2015.