A new analysis of an 18th-century portrait has rewritten the legacy of Francis Williams, a wealthy Jamaican scholar who was born into slavery and, whose intellectual brilliance was long dismissed. X-rays and high-resolution scans of the painting – held by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum – uncovered hidden clues linking Williams to the 1759 appearance of Halley’s Comet, a breakthrough moment in modern science.

Historian Prof. Fara Dabhoiwala discovered that the painting, once wrongly thought to satirise a Black man posing as a Georgian gentleman, was, in fact, commissioned by Williams himself to immortalise his achievements. The artwork reveals precise astronomical details, including intersecting lines that match Halley’s Comet’s trajectory and constellations visible over Jamaica in 1759. The page number in Williams’s open book corresponds to a section of Newton’s Principia explaining comet trajectories.

This evidence suggests Williams successfully calculated and observed the comet’s path, vindicating Edmond Halley’s predictions and Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity – yet credit went exclusively to European astronomers. Proposed for fellowship of the Royal Society in 1716, Williams was rejected “on account of his complexion”. His writings were never preserved, a reflection of the white supremacist society he navigated.

By 1759, Williams had inherited plantations, opened a school for free Black children, and stood as a rare example of a Black intellectual in a colonial world that mocked his intellect. This revelation not only restores his place in the history of science but challenges centuries of erasure, with Dabhoiwala calling the painting “a powerful statement” of Black excellence in the Age of Enlightenment.

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