Washing the Ethiopian White

In early times, the Greek word Άιθιοψ (Aithiops) was used of anyone of black colour; in the unreliable version by Syntipas, the man (who there is washing himself in a river) is identified as from India.

He goes on to comment that 'when men aspire to eminence in any of the various arts or sciences, without being gifted with the innate powers or abilities for such attainments, it is only like attempting to wash the Blackamoor white.

'[4] Early allusion to the fable appears in the work of Lucian, who uses the phrase Αιθοπα σμηχεις proverbially in his epigram "Against an Ignoramus": You wash the Ethiopian in vain; why not give up the task?

Here a despondent Ethiopian is pictured seated at a fountain where two Europeans are attempting to wash away his colour; the illustration is followed by a translation into Latin of Lucian's epigram.

[11] A third source reinforcing use of the fable in Christian Europe was an apparent reference to it by the Jewish prophet Jeremiah: 'Can the Nubian ['Cushite' in the Hebrew] change his skin or the leopard his spots?'

However, the episode of the baptized Ethiopian in the Christian New Testament (Acts 8.26–39) taught the different lesson that outward appearance is not everything and even that the inward nature may be changed, giving rise to the paradox at the start of Richard Crashaw's epigram on this subject: 'Let it no longer be a forlorn hope/ To wash an Ethiop'.

[12] The ability to undo the created order of the world is through the action of divine grace, and it is this doctrine which underlies the Renaissance pagan presentation of Ben Jonson's "The Masque of Blackness" (1605).

The Ethiopian moon-goddess reassures him that his quest is at an end in Britain, which is Ruled by a sun, that to this height doth grace it : Whose beams shine day and night, and are of force To blanch an Æthiop, and revive a corse.

'If water would stand still in heaven, and a black crow become white, and myrrh grow sweet as honey, then ignorant men and fools might understand and become wise.

The humourist Thomas Hood manages no better in his poem "A Black Job", which takes as its subject a bogus philanthropic scheme to bathe away the skin colour of Africans so that they 'Go in a raven and come out a swan'.

Satirising the mistress of the future George IV, it shows Frances Villiers, Countess of Jersey, sitting in an arm-chair while two ladies wash her face, which has the complexion of a mulatto.

In a travesty of Alciato's emblematic image, a group of knights clad in mediaeval armour keep a bath topped up with hot water and scrub down the king, who crouches in it wearing his regalia.

[26] A later advertisement for Christmas 1901 shows a black mother carrying a screaming child out to a washing tub while three concerned youngsters peer round the corner of the cabin.