Central allegorical tenets of the image are in turn based on a poem by Isaac Teale, "The Sable Venus: An Ode" (included in Edwards' book) which, according to Dan Chiasson, who reviewed Lewis's collection in The New Yorker, "celebrates the pleasures of raping slave women, since black and white-Sable Venus and Botticelli's Venus-are, after all, the same 'at night'. The image has an African woman who like many images of Venus Anadyomene stands on an opened half-shell, but this black Venus is surrounded by white cherubs and moves across the Middle Passage, urged on by Triton. The title of the book comes from an image by British painter Thomas Stothard (1755–1834), an engraving of which served as the frontispiece of the 1801 edition of History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies by British politician Bryan Edwards, a staunch supporter of the slave trade who published a number of books describing the economy and history of the West Indies. Engraving by William Grainger of Thomas Stothard, Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies, 1801.
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