This print portrays the first Black American enslaved woman to have her writings published. Phillis Wheatley sits at a table holding a quill pen, her head resting on the other hand in a pose that indicates creative thought. The image is also the first known individual portrait of an American woman of African descent, made as the frontispiece for the author's "Poems on Various Subjects, Religion and Moral" (London, 1773; second edition London and Boston, 1773). Today, many scholars believe that Scipio Moorhead, an enslaved man of African descent who lived near the author in Boston, created the image—Wheatley dedicated one of her poems "To S.M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works," and his identity was later established from a note she had made in a copy of her book. His name is not engraved on the print, however, and early commentators on Wheatley do not mention him as the designer. Moorhead's achievements as an artist remain obscure because none of his drawings or paintings survive [see References, Slaughter 2013].
<bdi>After <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Scipio_Moorhead" class="extiw" title="w:en:Scipio Moorhead"><span title="American artist">Scipio Moorhead</span></a>
</bdi>
1773 <a href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q96384174#P571" title="Edit this at Wikidata"><img alt="Edit this at Wikidata" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg/10px-OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg.png" decoding="async" width="10" height="10" style="vertical-align: text-top" srcset="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg/15px-OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg.png 1.5x, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg/20px-OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg.png 2x" data-file-width="20" data-file-height="20"></a>
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