The Garden Museum in London has launched a campaign to buy the earliest known portrait of a Black British gardener. The museum hopes to raise $560,000 to keep the rare historical record in a public U.K. collection.
The prized 18th-century painting by an unknown artist, depicts John Ystumllyn, a renowned gardener who lived and worked in Wales. When he sat for the portrait in 1754, John was in his late teens, and is shown elegantly dressed in a blue suit and waistcoat. The painting has been on loan to the Garden Museum since 2023, but the institution hopes to see it permanently installed beside Portrait of a Black Gardener, another 1905 portrait by Harold Gilman that it acquired in 2013.
“The Garden Museum celebrates the heroes and heroines of British gardening,” said the museum’s director Christopher Woodward. “John Ystumllyn should also be one of our heroes, and it would be a privilege to share his story.”
The Garden Museum in London. Photo: Shutterstock.
Most of what we know about John is derived from a biography written in 1888 by Robert Isaac Jones, whose source was his grandfather, who had known John. Born in 1736, John was abducted from West Africa by slave traders when he was just eight years old. He was taken to the Ystumllyn estate in Criccieth by the Wynn family, who trained him in horticulture and employed him as a gardener. He excelled, and was recorded as working “more or less perfectly.”
Jones described John as “handsome,” and claimed that many local women competed for his affections. He eventually met Margaret Gruffydd, another worker on the estate, and the pair ran away from Ystumllyln to get married in 1768. The couple had seven children, of which five lived to adulthood. Some of their descendants still live in the region today.
Having lost his job after eloping, John worked as a land steward on the nearby farm of Ynysgain Fawr. He later worked again for the Wynn family, which gifted him a cottage as payment for his many years of service. When John died of jaundice in 1786, he was commemorated with a short verse on his tombstone by the poet Dafydd Sion Siams. “Born in India, to Wales I came,” reads the first line.
The John Ystumllyn rose in the gardens of Buckingham Palace in London, 2022. Photo: Kirsty O’Connor / POOL / AFP via Getty Images.
John’s enduring cultural impact has only grown in recent years. The gardener was cited as an influence on the flower-infused Burberry coat worn by British racing driver Lewis Hamilton to the Met Gala in 2024. A new rose variety commemorating John was planted by Queen Elizabeth II in the gardens of Buckingham Palace in 2022.
The Gardening Museum has an online campaign for public donations to complement its grant funding applications, in the hopes of raising the £420,000 ($560,000) needed to acquire the portrait of John. It is also conducting a research project into the gardener, led by special projects officer Edward Adonteng.
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