Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the art of Agostino Brunias 9781526120465

Citation preview

Perceived as straightforward documents of visual ethnography, Brunias’s paintings have been understood as visual field guides for reading race in the colonial West Indies. For the first time, this book investigates how the artist’s images both reflected and refracted ideas about race, helping to construct racial categories while simultaneously exposing their constructedness and underscoring their contradictions. Though grounded in close visual analysis, it uses various critical lenses and an interdisciplinary array of materials, including period historical and literary texts and secondary scholarship from a variety of fields, to inform its interpretations and conclusions. Ultimately, it offers provocative new insights into Brunias’s work, gleaned from a broad survey of the artist’s paintings, many of which are reproduced here for the first time.

Colouring the Caribbean

Colouring the Caribbean is the first comprehensive study of Agostino Brunias’s West Indian paintings. Working primarily in St Vincent and Dominica at the end of the eighteenth century, Brunias painted for plantocrats and the colonial elite, creating romanticised pictures featuring Caribbeans of colour – socalled ‘Red’ and ‘Black’ Carib Indians, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race. The book explores the full scope of these images, investigating their role in reifying then developing notions of race.

Colouring the Caribbean Race and the art of Agostino Brunias Mia L. Bagneris

A critical addition to the bookshelves of historians working on the art and visual culture of the Anglo-American world, Colouring the Caribbean will also be of interest to scholars in race and gender studies, African diaspora studies, Atlantic world studies, slavery studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and eighteenth-century studies. Mia L. Bagneris is Jessie Poesch Junior Professor of Art History at Tulane University

Bagneris

Cover image: Agostino Brunias, Linen Market, Dominica, c. 1780 (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

ISBN 978-1-5261-2045-8

9 781526 120458 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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Colouring the Caribbean

series editors

Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon series editors Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic structures by foregrounding thatMarsha challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields Amelia G.work Jones, Meskimmon of traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.

Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its

These acknowledge the impact of recent on our understanding of the most books basic will structures by foregrounding workscholarship that challenges complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of worldthe conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of wide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas across traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual national and continental borders.

cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.

Also available in the series

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Art, and touch of Fiona Candlin temporalities and cartographies ourmuseums understanding the complex The artwork: Participation from fluxus to relational aesthetics  Anna Dezeuze (ed.) that‘do-it-yourself’ have emerged through centuries of world-wide trade, political Fleshing out surfaces: Skin in French artmovement and medicine,of1650–1850  Mechthild colonisation and the diasporic people and ideasFend

across national andofcontinental borders. The journey of the ‘painterly real’, The political aesthetics the Armenian avant-garde: 1987–2004  Angela Harutyunyan The matter of miracles: Neapolitan baroque sanctity and architecture  Helen Hills The face of medicine: Visualising medical masculinities in late nineteenth-century Paris  Mary Hunter Glorious catastrophe: Jack Smith, performance and visual culture  Dominic Johnson Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories  Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (eds) Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil  Luciana Martins After the event: New perspectives in art history  Charles Merewether and John Potts (eds) Women, the arts and globalization: Eccentric experience  Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe (eds) Flesh cinema: The corporeal turn in American avant-garde film  Ara Osterweil After-affects|after-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual Feminist museum  Griselda Pollock Vertiginous mirrors: The animation of the visual image and early modern travel  Rose Marie San Juan The synthetic proposition: Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art  Nizan Shaked The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England  Kimberley Skelton The newspaper clipping: A modern paper object  Anke Te Heesen, translated by Lori Lantz Screen/space: The projected image in contemporary art  Tamara Trodd (ed.) Art and human rights: Contemporary Asian contexts  Caroline Turner and Jen Webb Timed out: Art and the transnational Caribbean  Leon Wainwright Performative monuments: Performance, photography, and the rematerialisation of public art  Mechtild Widrich

Colouring the Caribbean Race and the art of Agostino Brunias

Mia L. Bagneris

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Mia L. Bagneris 2018 The right of Mia L. Bagneris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 2045 8 hardback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements

Introduction 

vi xiii 1

1 Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black: race-ing

the Carib divide39

2 Merry and contented slaves and other island myths:

r­ epresenting Africans and Afro-Creoles in the Anglo-American world92

3 Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana: mixed-race Venuses and Vixens as the fruits of imperial enterprise 

4 Can you find the white woman in this picture? Brunias’s ‘ladies’ of ambiguous race

136 182

Coda – Pushing Brunias’s buttons, or rebranding the plantocracy’s painter: the afterlife of Brunias’s imagery  215 Index

240

List of

Figures

  1. Agostino Brunias, A Planter and his Wife, with a Servant, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection2   2. Joseph Vien, ‘Eunuque Blanc’, etching from Caravanne du sultan à la Mecque, mascarade turque donnée a Rome par Messieurs les pensionnaires de l’Academie de France et leurs amis au Carnaval de l’année 1748 (Paris: n.p., 1749), p. 53, digital image courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program 15   3. Attributed to Agostino Brunias for Robert Adam, ‘Design for the Painted Breakfast Room in the Family Pavilion’, one of three designs in pen, ink, and watercolour by Robert Adam in 1760 © National Trust Images/John Hammond 22   4. Unknown artist, 1st National Hero, Chief of Chiefs, c. 2000, photo courtesy of Dr Lennox Honychurch 40   5. Charles Grignon after Agostino Brunias, Chatoyer the Chief of the Black Caribs in St. Vincent with his Five Wives, 1801, courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University 41   6. Agostino Brunias, Treaty between the British and the Black Caribs (Bridgeman title: Pacification with the Maroon Negroes in the Island of Jamaica), oil on canvas, 56 x 61 cm, private collection, photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images 42   7. Benjamin West, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, 1771–72, oil on canvas, 191.8 x 273.7 cm, courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr Collection) 43   8. Unknown artist, Vöelkertafel, mid-eighteenth century, courtesy of the Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art, Vienna, Austria53   9. Agostino Brunias, A Family of Charaibes in the Island of St. Vincent, oil on canvas, 22 x 24 in. (56 x 61 cm), private collection, photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images  58



List of figures

10. Agostino Brunias, A Leeward Islands Carib family outside a Hut, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection59 11. Attributed to Cristoforo dall’Acqua after John Gabriel Stedman, Famiglia Indiana Caraiba, c. 1801–50, courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University  60 12. Sébastien Le Clerc, ‘Couple Caraïbe des Antilles’, from JeanBaptiste du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles habitées par les François. Divisée en deux tomes, et enrichie de cartes & de figures, Tome I [–IV] (Paris: Chez Thomas Iolly, au palais, en la salle des merciers, à la palme, & aux armes d’Hollande, 1667). Bibliotheca Americana: catalogue of the John Carter Brown Library in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, photo courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University 65 13. Agostino Brunias, Caribbeans on a Path (Les Caraïbes noirs de Saint-Vincent), n.d., Musée de Aquitaine, Bordeaux, inv.: 2003.4.22, photo © J. M. Arnaud, mairie de Bordeaux 68 14. Agostino Brunias, A Linen Market with a Linen-stall and Vegetable Seller in the West Indies, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 69 15. Agostino Brunias, West Indian Man of Color, Directing Two Carib Women with a Child, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 74 16. Francesco Bartolozzi (for John Gabriel Stedman), “From different Parents, different Climes we came,/ At different Periods”; Fate still rules the same./ Unhappy Youth while bleeding on the ground;/ ’Twas Yours to fall-but Mine to feel the wound, 1796, courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University77 17. Isaac Mendes Belisario, ‘Koo, Koo, or Actor-Boy’, plate 5, from Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica, 1837, lithograph with watercolour, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Folio A 2011 24, photo courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art  79 18. Agostino Brunias, Free West Indian Dominicans, c. 1770, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection95 19. Agostino Brunias, A Mother with her Son and a Pony, c. 1775, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 96 20. Agostino Brunias, Servants Washing a Deer, c. 1775, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 97

vii

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List of figures

21. Johann Zoffany, The Family of Sir William Young, c. 1767–69, oil on canvas, courtesy of the Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool 98 22. Daniel Lerpinière after George Robertson, A View in the Island of Jamaica, of Part of the River Cobre near Spanish Town, 1778 © UK Government Art Collection 102 23. George Robertson, Spring Head of the Roaring River, 1775, Wallace Campbell Collections, Kingston, Jamaica, photo: Franz Marzouca, courtesy of Wallace Campbell Collections 104 24. Agostino Brunias, Mulatress Purchasing Fruit from a Negro Woman (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology title: Mulatress Purchasing Fruit from a Negro Wench), mid-late eighteenth century, gift of Harvard College Library, courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM# 975–5–30/9416c (digital file 99320189) 105 25. Agostino Brunias, Natives Bathing in a River, n.d., private collection, photo courtesy of Sotheby’s 107 26. Agostino Brunias, View on the River Roseau, Dominica, 1770/80, oil on canvas, 84.1 x 158 cm (33 1/8 x 62 3/16 in.), gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne, 1953.14, The Art Institute of Chicago, photo: Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY 108 27. Agostino Brunias, Natives on a Track near a Village, n.d., private collection, photo courtesy of Sotheby’s 108 28. Agostino Brunias, Handkerchief Dance on the Island of Dominica, n.d., private collection, photo: Simon Dickinson Ltd110 29. Isaac Mendes Belisario, ‘Koo, Koo, or Actor Boy’, plate 6, from Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica, 1837, lithograph with watercolour, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Folio A 2011 24, photo courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art 116 30. Isaac Mendes Belisario, ‘French Set-Girls’, from Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica, 1837, lithograph with watercolour, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Folio A 2011 24, photo courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art 119 31. Unknown artist (recent attribution to John Rose), Plantation Scene (also known as Old Plantation), c. 1780–90, watercolour on laid paper, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller  120



List of figures

32. Christian Friedrich Mayr, Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Spring, Virginia, 1838, oil on canvas, 61 x 74.9 cm, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina, 52.9.23 121 33. Agostino Brunias, The Handkerchief Dance, c. 1770–80, oil on canvas, 31.7 x 25.4 cm, CTB.1996.27, photo © Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza124 34. Print made by Agostino Brunias, A Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in the Island of Dominica, 1779, stipple engraving and etching with hand colouring on moderately thick, slightly textured, beige wove paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 127 35. Agostino Brunias, Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing, mid-late eighteenth century, gift of Harvard College Library, courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM# 975–5–30/9416d (digital file 99320190) 137 36. Agostino Brunias, French Mulatresses of St. Dominica in their Proper Dress, mid-late eighteenth century, gift of Harvard College Library, courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM# 975–5–30/9416a (digital file 99320191)138 37. Agostino Brunias, French Mulatress of St. Dominica and a Negro Woman, mid-late eighteenth century, gift of Harvard College Library, courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM# 975–5–30/9416b (digital file 99320188)139 38. William Grainger after Thomas Stothard, The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies, 1801, courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University 146 39. Jean-Marc Nattier, Mademoiselle de Clermont en Sultane, 1733 © The Wallace Collection, London 154 40. Agostino Brunias, West India Washerwomen, c. 1779, National Library of Jamaica, photo courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica 155 41. Giuseppe Cesari (Cavalier d’Arpino), Diana and Actaeon, 1603, The Museum of Fine Arts Budapest © The Museum of Fine Arts Budapest / Scala / Art Resource, NY, photo: Jozsa Denes 157 42. Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Diana Surprised by Actaeon, 1559, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY 158 43. Attributed to Philip Wickstead, Portrait of a Lady, n.d., private collection, photo © Christie’s Images Ltd  160

ix

x

List of figures

44. William Blake, Europe Supported by Africa and America, 1792, courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University164 45. Agostino Brunias, Colonial Scene (Two Mulatresses and a Child with a Black Woman Selling Fruit), n.d., private collection, photo © Christie’s Images Ltd, courtesy of the Photographic Archive at the Yale Center for British Art 169 46. Agostino Brunias, A West Indian Flower Girl and Two other Free Women of Color, c. 1769, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 172 47. Agostino Brunias, Linen Market, Dominica, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 183 48. Jose de Alcibar (attributed to), De Español y Negra, Mulato (From Spaniard and black, mulatto), c. 1760, Denver Art Museum Collection: gift of the Collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer, 2014.217, photo courtesy of the Denver Art Museum  187 49. Isaac Mendes Belisario, ‘Creole Negroes’, from Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica, 1837, lithograph with watercolour, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, folio A 2011 24, photo courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art 189 50. Agostino Brunias, Ma Commêre, n.d., private collection, photo © Christie’s Images Ltd 194 51. Agostino Brunias, West Indian Creole Woman, with her Black Servant, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 195 52. Agostino Brunias, Market Day, Roseau, Dominica, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 196 53. Agostino Brunias, Free West Indian Creoles in Elegant Dress, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection197 54. Agostino Brunias, View of Roseau Valley, Island of Dominica, Showing Africans, Carib Indians, and Creole Planters, mid-late eighteenth century, gift of Louis V. Keeler, class of 1911, and Mrs Keeler, photo courtesy of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University 200 55. Agostino Brunias, Two Ladies Attended by a Negro Servant, n.d., private collection, photo © Christie’s Images Ltd, courtesy of the Photographic Archive at the Yale Center for British Art  204 56. Agostino Brunias, A Lady and a Mulatress with a Negro Servant Standing in Back, n.d., private collection, photo © Christie’s



List of figures

Images Ltd, courtesy of the Photographic Archive at the Yale Center for British Art 206 57. Agostino Brunias, Creole Woman and Servants, c. 1770–80, oil on canvas, 30.5 x 22.9 cm, CTB.1985.5, photo © Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza 207 58a–r. Attributed to Agostino Brunias, late eighteenth century, gouache paint on tin verre fixé, ivory (backing), glass, gilt metal, h. x diam.: 1 x 3.7 cm (3/8 x 1 7/16 in.), Cooper Hewitt Museum, gift of R. Keith Kane from the Estate of Mrs Robert B. Noyes 216 59. Nicolas Eustache Maurin, ‘Portrait of Toussaint Louverture’, lithograph, 51 x 33 cm, from Iconographie des contemporains depuis 1789 jusqu’à 1829 (Paris, 1833; engraver François Séraphin Delpech, 1778–1825), p. 65, John M. Kelly Library, The Sablé Collection, University of Toronto, BBQ-2855, photo courtesy of the Special Collections, John M. Kelly Library, University of Toronto 220 60. Print made by Agostino Brunias, Free Natives of Dominica, 1780, stipple engraving and etching on moderately thick, slightly textured, beige wove paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection222 61. Print made by Agostino Brunias, A Negroes Dance in the Island of Dominica, 1779, stipple engraving and etching on moderately thick, slightly textured, beige wove paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 223 62. Print made by Agostino Brunias, The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl, 1779, stipple engraving and etching on moderately thick, moderately textured, beige wove paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 224 63. Print made by Agostino Brunias, The West India WasherWomen, 1779, stipple engraving and etching on moderately thick, moderately textured, beige wove paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 225 64. Nicolas Ponce after Agostino Brunias, illustrations from Recueil de vues des lieux principaux de la colonie françoise de SaintDomingue…, 1791, courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University 226 65. Print made by Louis Charles Ruotte, The West India Flower Girl, undated, stipple engraving and etching with hand colouring on moderately thick, moderately textured, cream laid paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 228

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List of figures

66. J. Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, ‘Nègre et Négresse de Saint-Domingue’, from Encyclopédie des voyages, contenant l’abrégé historique des moeurs, usages, habitudes domestiques, religions, fêtes (Paris: Deroy, 1796), Musée du Quai Branly, Réserve F 24 G76 1796, photo: National Library of France 229 67. Agostino Brunias, Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape, c. 1770–96, oil on canvas, 20 x 26 1/8 in. (50.8 x 66.4 cm), Brooklyn Museum, gift of Mrs Carll H. de Silver in memory of her husband, by exchange and gift of George S. Hellman, by exchange, 2010.59 231 68a–g. Unknown artist (after Agostino Brunias), untitled watercolours from the collection of Aaron and Marjorie Matalon, n.d., courtesy of Dr Sarah Clunis, photo by Francine Stock 234 Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

Acknowledgements

Now that I have come to end of this project, it seems appropriate to acknowledge the people who supported it – and me – from the very ­­ beginning. First, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, who took a purple-haired, tongue-pierced, combat-boot-wearing first-year undergraduate under her intimidatingly smart and always immaculately dressed wing and made a scholar of her. Her relentless encouragement and steadfast confidence in me  led me to graduate school, and her example significantly informs the  scholarly orientation of this book. I am grateful for her comments on early drafts of this work and for her continued mentorship. I hope I have made her proud. This book certainly would not be if not for the mentorship of Werner Sollors, a premier scholar in the field of interracial and mixed-race studies (to name only one of his many specialities) and another unwavering advocate for the project since its inception. At every stage of this project, Werner has been an invaluable resource, a reliable cheerleader, and a thoughtful reader. His comments on early drafts of the manuscript immeasurably shaped the final product. I continue to rely on his guidance and cannot overstate how much his support has meant to me. I must also acknowledge Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw who, throughout this long journey, has been generous with her knowledge, her insights, and her time. In Gwendolyn I have found a kindred spirit with shared scholarly interests, a similar point of view, and a fabulous sense of humour to boot. She has laughed and cried over the pages of this book with me, and I know that she will be there to do the same for the next one (and the one after that, and the one after that …). If not for Jennifer Roberts, I probably never would have encountered Agostino Brunias’s paintings at all! It seems like forever ago that I discovered Brunias’s work in the storage tombs of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology while on a wild goose chase for a painting about which to write my seminar paper for her class (I was originally looking for an apparently non-existent casta painting in the collection). Since those

xiv

Acknowledgements

very early days, Jennifer has been an excellent critical reader whose feedback ­­considerably informed and improved this book. A summer research fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art provided early support for this project including access to the largest publicly held collection of Brunias works in the United States and an invaluable cache of relevant collateral images and primary and secondary resources. I am grateful to the entire staff there, especially Abigail Armistead, who spent many hours with me in the freezing storage room looking at the Brunias paintings, and Gillian Forrester for sharing her expertise in prints in general and her knowledge of the Brunias prints in particular. I must also give a shout-out to my co-fellow and friend that summer, Laura MacColluch, for her companionship and for the many late-night conversations about our work whose insights made their way into these chapters. I am also grateful to the staff and fellows at Harvard University’s W. E. B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research (now the W. E. B. DuBois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center) where I was privileged to be in residence during the academic year 2007–08, and especially to its director Henry Louis Gates, Jr, another longtime mentor and supporter of this project. This project could not have come to fruition without the institutional support of Tulane University. Generous research leaves allowed me the time and space to complete the manuscript, and a grant from the School of Liberal Arts helped secure images and reproduction rights. I am especially grateful for the personal encouragement of Dean Carole Haber and the support of my colleagues in both the Newcomb Art Department and the Africana Studies Program, particularly Elizabeth Hill Boone, Anne Dunlop, Michael Plante, and Rosanne Adderley, all of whom offered informal feedback on my work and valuable encouragement and advice as I negotiated the publication process. I must also single out my friend and colleague Stephanie Porras for many conversations over coffee, cocktails, or lunch that were especially important to sorting out my ideas for the final chapter, and I owe a debt of gratitude, as well, to Sarah Clunis, my friend and counterpart at Xavier University, for sharing both her insights as an art historian and the story of her personal connection to Brunias imagery with me. Throughout the course of this project, I have been privileged to have productive conversations – in person and in cyberspace – with a number of fantastically smart scholars and curators, several of whom also offered formal feedback on my writing. For this, I wish to thank: Karen C. C. Dalton, Suzanne Preston Blier, Emily Clark, Cheryl Finley, Deborah Willis, Susan Haskell, Joan McMurray, Lennox Honychurch, Robert Farris Thompson, Rick Powell, Maurie McInnis, Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley, David Bindman, Vincent Brown, Paul H. D. Kaplan, Glenda Carpio, Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Kay



Acknowledgements

Dian Kriz, Rich Aste, Adrienne L. Childs, and Anna Arabindan-Kesson. Additionally, I would like to thank Joanna Jeskova, Terri Oliver, Kathleen Cloutier, Josiah Epps, Mary Anne Adams, Ellen Bull, Molly LeBlanc, Elizabeth Guilbeau, Alicia Dugas, Francine Stock, Wendy Ikemoto, Ally Field, Laura Murphy, Michael Jeffries, Derrick Ashong, Lyndon Gill, Nancy Goldstein, Nikki A. Greene, Jordana Moore Saggese, Omari Weekes, Phyllis Adrian, Andrea Adrian, and Pamela Mills Allen for gestures of kindness and support, big and small. I must acknowledge the terrific research assistance of Devon Youngblood, Susanne Hackett, and Emily Alesandrini and the invaluable help of art publication specialist Gina Broze in securing some especially tricky images and reproduction rights. I could not have worked with a more terrific publisher than Manchester University Press, and I am especially grateful for the patience, advice, and support of Emma Brennan and the assistance of Alun Richards, Paul Clarke, and Andrew Kirk. Finally, I must thank my family and friends: my mother, Althea Leonard, who firmly believed that museums were great places for little kids and whose example – working on her art history MA thesis in her nightgown in the wee hours of the morning during my elementary school years – clearly made an impression on me; my father, Michael Bagneris, who impressed upon me the power of a good argument; my step-parents Rick Foster and Madlyn Bagneris whose steadfast support of me and glowing pride in my accomplishments couldn’t be any more heartfelt if we shared the same DNA; my sister Elizabeth Bagneris Pasquier for, among a million other things, patiently listening to lengthy excerpts of this tome over the phone; my siblings Alexa and Julian for comic relief when I most needed it; my incredible friends Kat and Geoff Cost, Rosana Cruz, Jhilya Mayas, Ada McMahon, the Verlendens, and all of the kibbutzniks at Shir Chadash for continued encouragement and for being willing to take my kids off my hands so that I could work; and last, but never least, those incredible kids themselves, Izzy and Zora, who force me to be a more disciplined scholar and a better person every day, and my wife, Aundeah Kearney, whom I never would have met had it not been for Agostino Brunias, and who helps makes this work, and everything else, possible every day.

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Introduction

July 2007, Yale Center for British Art – reflections on Agostino Brunias’s A Planter and his Wife (fig. 1) … The painting is relatively small – about 12 x 10 inches – and a wonderfully exquisite little gem, its bright gold frame setting off the work of a talented colourist. Pristine whites and vivid pale blues are punctuated with punches of coral red; deep greens and rich ochres define the landscape. In the background are all the hallmarks of an idyllic island day; under a perfect canopy of blue sky and fluffy white clouds, a pair of palm trees rise in the right margin of the picture, nestled against the calm, crystal waters of the Caribbean Sea. However, in the midst of this quintessential tropical splendour, two figures in the foreground, a man and a woman, command the viewer’s immediate attention. Although he is dressed to beat the heat, the man manages to cut an impressive figure in long white trousers, white shirt, and white waistcoat – all immaculately spotless. He accessorises the outfit with black cravat, black shoes with silver buckles, and a long mustard-coloured dress coat with shiny gold buttons, completing the ensemble with a black ‘planter’s hat’. Surely his elegant dress demonstrates his wealth and status, but not so much as his pose, for the artist has frozen him in a perpetual state of showing off; his outstretched arm gestures towards the splendid natural beauty all around him as he turns his face to the lady at his side in a move that silently proclaims his ownership of all that surrounds them. In response to her mate’s grand gesture of possession, the miffed expression on the woman’s pinched face seemingly replies, ‘Really, is this all?’ She stands exceedingly unimpressed, one arm akimbo, in her fine white gown, the open robe of her skirt revealing a bright blue petticoat in a striking hue that echoes the sky. The delicate lace at her elbows and décolletage, along with the coral laces that cinch the stays at her trim waist, the beribboned straw hat set haughtily on the side of her head, and the large gold earbobs that dangle from her lobes – all these announce that she was born for better than this. Behind both figures, a black woman nearly recedes into the shadowy background of

2

Colouring the Caribbean

1

Agostino Brunias, A Planter and his Wife, with a Servant, c. 1780, oil on canvas,

a thick tree on the left, saved from obscurity by the brilliant white of her open blouse and kerchief and the bright red of her simple skirt. As charming as this little island tableau may be, it is a rather predictable Caribbean take on the typical English conversation piece – complete with marginal black attendant – and unremarkable except for the subtlest hint of domestic discord thrown in for drama. That and the fact that, in comparison to the dark skin of the African woman, the flesh tones of her master and mistress are pale but, then again, not



Introduction

as pale as all that … With their elegant hats perched on heads of full of naps, the saffron-skinned planter and his wife are, perhaps, less white than black.1 From unimportant pebble to bedrock, or why Brunias? Why now?

On 7 August 1981 a certain high-up at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) wrote an inter-office memorandum recommending the sale of this painting of a mixed-race planter and his wife and nine other late eighteenth-century works in the Center’s collection by a little-known Italian artist named Agostino Brunias (c. 1730–96).2 Apparently the writer of the Yale memo felt that Brunias’s small, colourful canvases, depicting scenes of Caribbean life in some of the newly acquired territories of Britain’s growing empire and concerned almost exclusively with people of colour, did not reflect the Center’s concern with ‘British’ art; he ticked off his primary arguments in favour of selling the paintings in a terse, itemised list:

I would recommend the sale of the Brunias paintings … for the arguments below: 1.  Brunias is not English and very, very minor. 2.  The paintings are Mr. Mellon’s and we have told him that we intend no further changes to the lists of sales.3 3.  His books on West Indian subject matter are classed among his “Americana”. 4.  We have the prints. The paintings may or may not be for or after the engravings. They are not of high quality. 5.  Prof. Thompson has the photographs and slides.4 6.  They have tenuous connection with British Studies but, I suppose, could, if Mr. Mellon were persuaded, be offered to the Afro-American Cultural Center (if they have anywhere to look after them) or to the Ethnography department at the Peabody. He added, ‘I do not think we ought to stub our toe over such an unimportant pebble.’ While the memo might seem to undermine the project I undertake (after all, what sort of foolhardy scholar proposes a monograph about a ‘very, very minor’ artist?), I point to it in order to underscore the dramatic shifts in the field that have moved Agostino Brunias and his work from a footnote in the annals of British art studies to a subject deserving of scholarly attention. After arriving in London in 1758 to work as a draughtsman and decorative painter for the renowned architect Robert Adam (1728–92), Brunias, an Italian born and trained in Rome, left England some time around 1770 and landed in the British West Indies where he worked mainly on the Lesser Antilles islands of St Vincent and Dominica, initially painting for his primary patron, the colonial governor Sir William Young. For roughly the next ­quarter century,

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Brunias painted for plantocrats and the colonial elite like Young, creating romanticised tableaux that featured Caribbeans of colour – so-called ‘Red’ and ‘Black’ Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race. His refined pictures obscured the horrors of colonial ­­domination and plantation slavery by presenting instead picturesque market scenes, lively dances, and Edenic outdoor scenes often tinged with rococo naughtiness. The first comprehensive study of Agostino Brunias’s work, this book explores the role of the artist’s paintings in reifying notions of race in the British colonial Caribbean and also considers how the artist’s images both reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by Britons during the long eighteenth century. Had the author of the Yale memo been in possession of a crystal ball that could have predicted the striking turn that studies of British art (and the discipline of art history, in general) have taken in the nearly four decades since he penned these words, I suspect that he would have either quit the field in disgust or argued vehemently in favour of the Brunias works’ importance to the Center’s collection. Indeed, fortunately for me, the Yale Center did not sell its Brunias pictures, and, in fact, in the summer of 2007, generously offered me a fellowship to spend a month in residence, studying the Brunias pictures there and enjoying access to the institution’s enviable collection of British art and related resources. Moreover, during the tenure of my fellowship, the Center was in the throes of final preparations for Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, an historic exhibition developed around the Sketches of Character series by Belisario (1795–1849), a nineteenth-century Jewish Jamaican Creole artist whose work, despite some critical differences that this book will later explore, shares a number of features with Brunias’s own. In particular, like Belisario’s work, Brunias’s richly detailed paintings offer a unique, complex, and important depiction of Britain’s involvement in slavery, the development of colonial culture in the Americas, and the lives of people of various colours and conditions – indigenous, transplanted, and Creole; red, black, and brown; wealthy and poor; enslaved, free, and somewhere inbetween – who lived under Britain’s colonial regime in the West Indies. Though the writer of the Yale memo insisted that Brunias’s ‘Americana’ have a ‘very tenuous’ connection to British Studies, the histories of slavery, colonialism, and the construction of race that they illustrate are now considered integral to any study of British identity, and these concerns, far from being ‘unimportant pebbles’, constitute the very bedrock upon which some of the most exciting and rigorous recent scholarship in studies of British and American art and history is founded. My own project joins a distinguished chorus of voices including those of Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Tim Barringer, Jill H. Casid, David Dabydeen, Kay Dian Kriz, Charmaine A. Nelson, Beth Fowkes Tobin, Geoff Quilley, and Marcus Wood, among others, that is prob-



Introduction

ing the relationship between art and visual culture and the joint projects of Atlantic slavery, colonialism, and British imperial expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These scholars, like my colleagues in Atlantic world studies, are also persistently and provocatively troubling the artificial and generally hierarchical boundaries between the Continent and Britain, Britain and the Americas, metropole and colony, centre and periphery. I point to the memo, therefore, not to criticise its writer, whose opinions, though they now seem hopelessly out-of-touch, probably reflected the mainstream at the time they were written, or the Yale Center for British Art, which continues to make progressive contributions that importantly redefine the boundaries of British art. Instead, I aim to underscore the dramatic shifts in the academy, in art historical scholarship in general, and in British and American art studies in particular that have occurred over the last quarter century and made this project both possible and relevant. These include the rise of African diaspora studies and slavery studies scholarship and the subsequent attention paid to critical race theory and other branches of identity studies in the academy (especially feminist scholarship across the disciplines, gender studies, and queer theory); understandings of the intersectional experience of identity; colonial and postcolonial studies; and the growing interest in challenging constructed national boundaries as the best delimiters of historical inquiry. These changes in the scholarly terrain over the last several decades have transformed Brunias’s work – considered ‘very, very minor’ only a few decades ago – from curious trifles of exotica to important examples of colonial art worthy of serious critical attention. Writing the book on Brunias: on argument and scope

While I cannot dispute the fact that Agostino Brunias was not English by birth, this book contends that the artist’s work is most certainly ‘British’, depicting in rich detail – and subtly, albeit probably subconsciously, challenging with great insight – some of the ways in which Britons imagined their colonial world, particularly with regard to race. A commitment to close visual analysis grounds the entire project, with interpretations informed by period texts, history scholarship, and the influence of relevant critical scholarly discourses such as those that I have just mentioned. Moreover, it should – but in the interest of unequivocal clarity, will not – go without saying that notions of race are inextricably tied to and informed by other vectors of identity, particularly, in this case, gender, class, and status as free or enslaved, and that examination of these dynamics of interrelation are integral to any discussion of Brunias’s work. For the most part, however, my interpretations of Brunias’s images – particularly as guided by available period sources – accept the dominant colonial gaze as white, male, and heterosexual.5 Of course, although this may have

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been the dominant gaze, it certainly was not the only one, and I very much look forward to future Brunias scholarship that entertains the perspectives of white female viewers and male and female viewers of colour – both heterosexual and queer – more fully than the scope of this project has permitted.6 In viewing Brunias’s paintings through a variety of methodological lenses, I have aimed to be cognisant of the potential dangers of applying theories born of twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship to paintings produced roughly three centuries before such ideas shaped the academy, let alone the popular imagination. Moreover, I want to be clear about the fact that I am certainly not offering Brunias as some sort of contemporary critical race theorist avant la lettre who consciously brought constructionist theories of race to his canvases. I do not aim to assign such agency or intention to the artist whose paintings, in my view, reveal more about the complex and messy project of racial classification in the eighteenth-century Caribbean than they do about the artist himself or what his contemporary viewers fully understood. Throughout the chapters, I consider how the paintings might have been readily understood by eighteenth-century viewers and also explore some interpretations that might have been less easily accessible to Brunias’s contemporaries but nonetheless reveal the artist’s work as a potential index of the state of race in the time and place that he worked. Ultimately, I am interested in how works that were unequivocally meant to shore up the boundaries of race in the British colonial Caribbean manage to reveal instead – even if only for the modern viewer – what a fraught proposition that was. This complex quality of Brunias’s paintings distinguishes them from many other visual texts that were produced for the same purpose (and to which Brunias’s works are often likened) but that do not provide the same sort of evidence of the slippery state of race in the British colonial West Indies. In this project, I complicate the conventional and somewhat limiting interpretation of Brunias’s images as straightforward typological works of visual ethnography that, as part of the great Enlightenment project to catalogue the natural world, worked to establish fixed, empirically discernible racial categories. While associated with natural history’s passion for classification and the ‘scientificisation’ of race in that they were undoubtedly commissioned for this sort of purpose, Brunias’s pictures often fail to conform to the conventions of visual natural history or ethnographic tradition, and, in fact, often undermine the aims of these traditions. Superficially, the artist’s images of Red and Black Caribs, Africans and Afro-Creoles, and mixed-race women and men do, indeed, seem to reify racialised categories of being by ostensibly providing an unequivocal, visual guide to identify various racial groups. However, careful looking reveals that Brunias’s images, actually visually undercutting developing systems of racial categorisation as much as they help to define them, consistently fail to function as these unambiguous racial



Introduction

keys. I show how Brunias’s paintings might be understood as simultaneously participating in and subtly, but significantly, troubling ideas of race and racial classification during the eighteenth century. Ultimately, I understand the artist’s images as not so much recording race as helping to construct it while simultaneously exposing its constructedness and underscoring its contradictions. Furthermore, in exposing this tension, I also question the extent to which we should continue to regard Brunias unproblematically as the ‘plantocracy’s painter’, an artist whose works uncomplicatedly reflect plantocratic fantasies of Caribbean life in the service of slavery and colonial domination.7 Although one can certainly understand the appeal of Brunias’s idealised West Indian tableaux to colonial officials and planters, when read against the grain of its commission the artist’s oeuvre can also be understood to offer a completely original perception of this fundamentally inchoate moment in the history of race and of the forces that critically informed it. In the eighteenth century ‘race’ was a more elastic, contextually contingent term than it is today. Indeed, a cacophony of different understandings about the cause and significance of physical variation among human beings competed for primacy during this inchoate racial moment and contributed to eighteenth-century Britons’ unstable, frequently incoherent, and often contradictory notions about race. Scholarship on the early modern period has clearly demonstrated that, long before the 1700s, Britons registered complexional differences between Europeans and Africans and even evaluated those differences in ways that confirmed their own superiority.8 However, for most of the eighteenth century, the notion of race as an objective category of being and primary marker of human difference based upon a complex reckoning of ancestry and visual cues (e.g. skin colour and other phenotypic traits) by which humans could be classified into discrete groups was a nascent way of thinking. Roxann Wheeler’s scholarship has done much to elucidate the protean nature of the concepts and terminology related to race and skin colour in the eighteenth-century British world. Concentrating primarily on the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, Wheeler’s work challenges much other eighteenth-century scholarship that, not explicitly concerned with race, assumes that the relatively fixed concepts of race and its relationship to skin colour and physiognomy that are operative today functioned with similar currency by the 1700s. Instead, Wheeler demonstrates the far more ‘fluid articulation of human variety’ and ‘elastic conceptions’ that characterised racial designation in eighteenth-century British culture, such that a darkskinned man of African origin might be classified as a ‘white man’ by virtue of his Christian religion or a white Englishman called a ‘black man’ because of his unsavoury character.9 Wheeler convincingly argues that, for most of the eighteenth century, skin colour and other physical attributes were less important than markers such as religion, civility, and social rank – expressed

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through clothing, manners, language, and even systems of government – as fundamental distinctions of human variety. Furthermore, Wheeler’s scholarship shows how these ‘proto-racial ideologies’ persisted alongside developing racial ideologies long after the social and economic factors that originally produced them had changed.10 Focused on the dynamic definition of race and difference persistent during the majority of the eighteenth century, Wheeler identifies the last quarter of the eighteenth century – the precise period of Brunias’s Caribbean activity – as the moment of pivotal shift in racial discourse in which the notion of skin colour as the primary signifier of human difference emerged. Fundamental to this shift was a generally more ‘scientific’ view of the body, the product of Enlightenment thinking informed by advances in medicine that produced an anatomical model of the body and by the development of the natural history tradition with which Brunias’s work is so closely aligned. These developments formed the crucible in which the concept of race as a fixed, discrete, objective, and empirical category of identity was being forged. However, the protoracial ideologies with which Wheeler is most concerned, as well as persistent ancient explanations for phenotypical variety such as those based on climate or the four humours, continued to inform the unstable reality of race in the time and place in which Brunias worked. The lack of consensus resulting from these competing ideologies significantly informed the fraught state of white identity in the colonial West Indies. In addition to new ideologies of human difference that regarded skin colour as a primary signifier of identity, the ever more essential role of slavery as a part of the British colonial project and the imperial economy also influenced the calcification of racial classification schemes. With ‘black’ becoming an increasingly synonymous shorthand for ‘slave’, racial whiteness achieved an unprecedented currency, especially in relation to defining Britishness.11 Earlier  in the century, a free, dark-skinned man of African descent might be counted as an unqualified Englishman based upon his profession of Christianity; however, by the century’s end, such a designation, while still a possibility, was far from a likelihood. As whiteness, both in terms of complexion and culture, became increasingly prerequisite to Britishness, the claim to white identity also became more and more uncertain for Britons living in the so-called ‘torrid zones’ who carried the racial burden of the confluence of older ideas about race such as climate theory and newer ones about culture such as that of Creole cultural degeneracy. The latter charge was disproportionately directed towards women, and the scholarship of Kathleen Wilson, Kay Dian Kriz, Deirdre Coleman, and Angela Rosenthal aptly demonstrates how the female body constituted a sort of ‘cultural battleground’.12 Here the fight to shore up the shared boundaries of whiteness and British identity in the face of anxieties about the ‘precariousness of whiteness as an absolute value in



Introduction

an island culture’ was waged.13 Considering Brunias’s disproportionate attention to the female body, and particularly the mixed-race or ambiguously raced female body, my own scholarship joins this body of work in examining the inextricable tangle of race, gender, and place in the development of Caribbean colonial identities. This book aims to provide a thorough analysis of Agostino Brunias’s images of the West Indies. As the first project to survey the full breadth and depth of Brunias’s oeuvre, it offers several new observations made possible by an extensive knowledge of the artist’s works rather than reliance on the most widely known examples, especially since considering the entire body of work often yields different conclusions than viewing individual works in isolation. A variety of types of texts inform the careful visual analysis that foregrounds each chapter, including primary source material from Britons living in the West Indies, period texts relating to the British settlement of the Caribbean, relevant period fiction, and secondary scholarly material by historians, art historians, and literary critics. While much can be said about the British Caribbean as a region, each island had and has its own particular history, patterns, and culture. Not surprisingly, but rather unfortunately for projects such as mine, the vast majority of period texts and scholarship on the British West Indies pertains to the more well-established colonies such as Jamaica and Barbados. The study of the Ceded Islands where Brunias was active represents an exciting frontier of Caribbean studies scholarship to which this project hopes to contribute. Where possible, I have used sources related to the islands where Brunias is known to have worked such as Mrs  A.  C. Carmichael’s account of her time in St Vincent or Bernard Marshall’s work on free people of colour in the British Windward Islands. However, where useful and relevant, I have also drawn upon sources relating to other islands while trying to remain cognisant of the issues inherent in doing so. Mimicking the organisation of a colonial natural history text with an intentional irony signed in the stylised chapter titles, each of the first four chapters focuses on the depiction of one racial group while simultaneously suggesting the way in which Brunias’s images potentially undermine ideas of race as a fixed element of identity. This organisational strategy has allowed me to think critically about the several different types of paintings Brunias made in the Caribbean, while attending to the larger theoretical questions that unite the artist’s oeuvre. Although the representation of a particular racial group anchors each chapter, this does not preclude discussion of how Brunias depicted interaction between racial groups or analysis of the racialised dynamics of power in interracial scenes. Indeed, the book aims to show how the representation of one given racial group informed and was informed by the others. The first chapter, ‘Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black: raceing the Carib divide’, considers how the artist’s pictures of Carib Indians

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visually reinforced the insistent – and, following Peter Hulme and others, I argue, largely imagined – distinction between so-called ‘Red’ (also known as ‘Yellow’) and ‘Black’ Caribs made by British colonialists. By ‘largely imagined’ I do not mean to imply that there were no genotypic or phenotypic differences among various Carib communities in the Lesser Antilles, but to suggest that the British imagined – or, at the very least, exaggerated – the substance and significance of those differences in order to fit their colonial needs. While the limited scholarship on Brunias has tended to focus on his images of mixedrace and dark-skinned African and Afro-Creole people, his images of Caribs have been almost entirely neglected, with some scholars not even realising that two ostensibly very different types of Carib peoples are being represented. This chapter provides a focused study of Brunias’s Carib pictures within the political and cultural context of their creation, observing marked differences in the artist’s depictions of the two supposed Carib groups and considering the implications of those differences. Ultimately, I contend that Brunias’s images reinforced the separateness of ‘Red’ and ‘Black’ Caribs insisted upon by the British and supported their perceptions of Black Caribs as a problematic entity in the British colonial world. However, careful analysis also reveals the extent to which these works simultaneously underscore the problematic nature of the racial and cultural distinctions they aim to reify and point to deeply felt cultural anxieties about the inevitably hybrid character of colonial life and the difficulty of assigning and recognising race and place in colonial island society. The next chapter, ‘Merry and contented slaves and other island myths: representing Africans and Afro-Creoles in the Anglo-American world’, analyses the imaging – or, rather, the conspicuous lack thereof – of Africans and Afro-Creoles in British colonial art. This chapter places Brunias in the context of other British painters who worked in the Caribbean during the long eighteenth century, particularly George Robertson (1742–88) and Isaac Mendes Belisario, keeping in mind important differences in genre (vis-à-vis Robertson) and time period (vis-à-vis Belisario). With a particular emphasis on Brunias’s dancing scenes within the context of Anglo-American visual production, I consider the significance of the artist’s portrayal of presumably enslaved black people typically engaged in episodes of entrepreneurialism, leisure, or merrymaking. In his analysis of Atlantic slave traders, James Pope-Hennessy claimed that nothing better illustrates what he termed the ‘Myth of the Merry and Contented Slave’ than ‘a series of vignettes in the mode of the lovely coloured engravings of slave festivals based on the pictures of the eighteenth-century painter Agostino Brunyas [sic]’.14 For Pope-Hennessy and others, Brunias’s beautiful, orderly compositions depicting black West Indians paint a rosy picture of slave life in the islands that unequivocally denies the brutal reality of plantation slavery and amounts to nothing more than plantocratic



Introduction

p ­­ ropaganda.15 This is certainly one way to interpret Brunias’s pictures which, particularly in their focus on leisure rather than labour, do, undoubtedly, offer an idealised vision of life for black West Indians. However, given the overwhelming predominance, in the colonial Caribbean, of topographical and landscape art that primarily glorified planters’ visions of themselves while obscuring the role of slavery in generating West Indian wealth, the unique attention given to black people and to black culture in Brunias’s work deserves critical consideration. For example, Brunias’s inclusion of some specifically Afro-Creole elements of black island culture implicitly acknowledges the transplantation of black bodies to the colonial space, constituting a marked distinction from the construction of Afro-Caribbeans as pseudonatives in many colonial West Indian landscapes. Brunias uniquely highlights the African past of his black figures and the continuing influence of this past on the development of a vibrant AfroCreole colonial culture that, although created by it, also exists separate and apart from the world of the planters. Favourably comparing the lot of the enslaved to that of the poor in Britain, accounts by white Britons living in the West Indies such as those of William Young, 2nd Baronet, and Mrs  A.  C.  Carmichael typically stressed the bondsfolk’s love for and dependence on their supposedly benevolent ‘masters’. In contrast, as in his Carib pictures, Brunias’s images of enslaved West Indians superficially seem to conform to plantocratic ideas about race – his black figures do indeed appear merry and content; however, their merry contentment has nothing to do with their enslavement and everything to do with the culture they create for themselves. The artist’s paintings appealed to plantocratic delusions that justified slavery by providing his patrons with scenes of Afro-Caribbeans engaged in leisure rather than labour, but these images also implicitly suggest that the enslaved survived not through the benevolence of their so-called masters but through the strength of their own community and culture. Moreover, in his scenes of enslaved people selling their produce at market or engaged in dancing, playing music, or sport fighting can be read tacit references to that which he could not explicitly portray: the reality of individual agency among enslaved people and even the possibility of resistance. Brunias might not have painted these subversive elements, but he did paint the sort of independent black culture capable of producing them. In contrast to an artist like Belisario, whose compositions of black performers feel specifically staged for the white gaze in order to satisfy the psychic needs of British colonists confronted with the imminent reality of emancipation, Brunias’s paintings generally present Afro-Caribbeans in their own world (or as agents in the interracial marketplace) and concerned with their own activities. Moreover, he portrays the dynamism and diversity of this black world without caricature ­­ and with unparalleled sensitivity.

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To the extent that he can be considered well known at all, Brunias is most famous for his images of mixed-race women, and the third chapter, ‘Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana: mixed-race Venuses and Vixens as the fruits of imperial enterprise’, considers the virtual omnipresence of the mixed-race beauty, or ‘mulatress’, in the artist’s Caribbean pictures and within the context of gendered interracial relations of power in the islands.16 Kay Dian Kriz has argued that the ambiguous racial and social status of the mulatress figure served as a visual metaphor allowing Brunias to capture the state of the colonial West Indies – a locale popularly associated with laziness, leisure, luxury, licentiousness, and other forms of moral laxity such as heartless profit-making – as a potentially refined civilisation in the midst of development. Building upon Kriz’s scholarship, I assert that the mulatress appealed to Brunias – and to Britons – because of her ability to represent both the baser pleasures and profits to be taken in the Caribbean and the islands’ potential to conform to British ideals of societal refinement.17 Developing a sustained visual analogy between the mixed-race female body and the West Indian islands and their produce, Brunias paints the mulatress as the quintessential colonial Caribbean figure. This chapter also analyses Brunias’s adaptation of models from canonical Western art and eighteenth-century popular visual culture to consider the artist’s compositional and conceptual inventiveness. Taking a more theoretical tack than the previous chapters, the fourth chapter, ‘Can you find the white woman in this picture? Agostino Brunias’s “ladies” of ambiguous race’, culminates the study of Brunias’s work according to racial categorisation, exploring the artist’s depiction of racially ambiguous bodies (those that cannot be identified by sight as white or of colour) and offering a more comprehensive exploration of how the artist’s work can be understood as subtly undermining the fixed racial categories that it was commissioned to reify. In its consideration of Brunias’s ‘ambiguous’ bodies, the chapter necessarily grapples with the conspicuous rarity of figures, especially women, who can confidently be identified as white in Brunias’s oeuvre (i.e. almost none), and both period texts and current scholarship regarding the state of whiteness, and particularly white womanhood, in the British colonial Caribbean inform much of the analysis in the chapter. Presaging constructionist theories of racial identity, Brunias’s ambiguously raced figures point to the dilemmas of visualising race as well as to the artificiality of fixed racial identities, ultimately problematising the very idea of racial whiteness itself. A versatile artist, Brunias produced a number of engravings in addition to his paintings. These were published in books that apparently circulated rather freely. Several notable engravers – among them Philip Audinet (1766–1837), Charles Grignon (1714–1810), Nicolas Ponce (1746–1831), and Louis Charles Ruotte (1754–1806) – copied Brunias’s images or modelled their own scenes upon his, a fact that has troubled the waters of attribution,



Introduction

especially as Brunias’s star has risen in recent years. Moreover, in addition to the plethora of prints after Brunias, there is even a set of painted buttons that have been attributed to the artist. For the most part, I have focused this study on Brunias’s paintings, coming to this decision for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Brunias’s paintings incorporate the greatest diversity of subject matter and the most complex and challenging scenes, and most of the engravings made by the artist himself are after the paintings or feature very similar scenes. Additionally, Brunias was a talented colourist, and colour is a primary element of analysis in this investigation. Concentrating on the paintings has allowed me to attend carefully to colour as both a means and an end of expression in Brunias’s images while avoiding the vexing question of who made the colour choices in the extant hand-coloured engravings of the artist’s work (I would venture that, in all of the cases I have seen, it was almost certainly not Brunias himself). However, because of the significant proliferation and circulation of Brunias’s work in forms other than the original paintings, the concluding chapter, ‘Pushing Brunias’s buttons, or rebranding the plantocracy’s painter: the afterlife of Brunias’s imagery’, addresses the reproduction and appropriation of the artist’s imagery as well as the curious case of the ‘Brunias’ buttons. This coda examines the diverse ends to which Brunias’s images have been mobilised, almost from the very moment of their creation (at least as early as 1791) and continuing into the present day, as a way of understanding the flexibility and persistence of the artist’s oeuvre. The chapter opens with an investigation of the painted buttons in the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum that have been attributed to Brunias and are purported to have adorned the coat of Toussaint L’Ouverture, legendary leader of the Haitian Revolution. It concludes with a consideration of recent museum interest in acquiring Brunias’s work as a means of responding to calls for greater diversity in their collections. Although the claims of Brunias’s authorship and Toussaint’s ownership are both almost certainly apocryphal, ultimately I contend that the fact that Brunias’s imagery can, more than two centuries after its creation, simultaneously be characterised as plantocratic propaganda and regarded as fashion fit for an iconic Haitian revolutionary points to both its fundamental complexity and its enduring significance. But first … who was Agostino Brunias, or how does a classically trained Italian artist end up painting in the British colonial Caribbean?

As I previously mentioned, while the assertion that Brunias’s work is ‘not of high quality’ is arguable, the fact that he was not an Englishman or even British is not in dispute, and, upon initial consideration, it is indeed curious that the largest cache of paintings by an eighteenth-century Italian artist working in

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the Caribbean ended up in a repository devoted to the study of British art. Even more curious is that a scholar initially trained in the study of American art should undertake an analysis of his work as her first book project. However, these curious facts simply reflect the state of a field too theoretically big for the small thinking that adheres to artificial boundaries. In the course of pursuing support for this project, I have marketed myself as a historian of British art and of American art, as an African American studies scholar and a scholar of the culture of the Atlantic world, as a postcolonialist, as an eighteenth-century studies specialist, and as a Latin Americanist specialising in the Anglophone Caribbean, and throughout the course of this project I have had to be all of these things at one time or another. But really, Brunias’s work refuses to conform to the simple disciplinary boxes one is required to check off for a grant application. How could it? As a previously London-residing Italian, painting pictures of outnumbered indigenes, enslaved Africans and Afro-Creoles, and ‘mixed-breed’ mulattoes for transplanted Britons and their Creole children in colonial islands that ping-ponged between England and France, even in his own day Brunias and his work defied easy definition. This may explain why, though much can be said about the work of Agostino Brunias – who, particularly for an artist of the middling sort, left behind an impressive collection of paintings and engravings that can be reliably attributed to his own hand – little can be said with certainty about the artist himself. Even the artist’s name – both first and last – and his nationality have, at times, been in doubt. For example, the minutes of a meeting of the President and Fellows of Harvard College, dated 15 November 1790, include a notice thanking John Gardiner, Esquire, for his gift of, among other things, ‘six excellent Paintings finished by Brunias, a French painter of eminence’,18 while Edward Edwards’s 1808 Anecdotes of Painters confirms his nationality as Italian but records the painter’s name as ‘Augustine Brunias’.19 Edward Croft-Murray’s entry for Brunias in Decorative Painting in England, 1537–1837 attempts to reconcile these competing bits of Brunias biography by declaring him ‘of uncertain origin’ and noting that his nationality had been previously recorded as Italian but that his name ‘suggests he was a Frenchman’.20 Croft-Murray also records some of the many versions of the artist’s name; he has been known as Brunias, Brunais, and Brunyas, as Agostino, Augustine, Auguste – even Abraham, Austin, and Alexander!21 The erroneous notion that  Brunias was French might have been derived from records of his participation in a 1748 masquerade held by the French Academy in Rome, Caravanne du sultan à la Mecque or Caravan of the Sultan to Mecca. Joseph Vien recorded what might be the only portrait of Brunias, a sketch inscribed ‘Eunuque: M. Brunias’, in his drawings of the event, and, in the published folio he depicted the artist as a eunuch in elaborate Oriental dress (fig. 2). That the artist painted in islands that bounced back and forth between the French



Introduction

Joseph Vien, ‘Eunuque Blanc’, etching from Caravanne du sultan à la Mecque, mascarade turque donnée a Rome par Messieurs les pensionnaires de l’Academie de France et leurs amis au Carnaval de l’année 1748 (Paris: n.p., 1749), p. 53

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and the British throughout the last half of the eighteenth century and that he painted ‘mulatresses’, popularly identified as French, also probably informed this misconception. Given the themes prevalent in Brunias’s work and engaged in this book, it is tempting to consider whether Brunias might have consciously identified the parallels between the masquerades born in his native Italy and popular – as well as popularly derided – in his temporarily adopted home in England and the potentially protean character of identity in the colonial outposts of the Caribbean. Having seen, in Europe, white ladies dressed as blackamoors and princes pretending to be paupers, what might Brunias have made of a black-skinned ‘Indian’, an upstart planter assuming the airs of the old money elite, an enslaved African in the elegant attire of a planter, a saffron-skinned mulatto who was indeed a planter, or a free coloured maid whose pale skin was indiscernible from her mistress’s? Might the West Indies have appeared to him like one big masquerade, a place where seeing could be deceiving, and identity – malleable and mutable – was uncertain and unfixed? There is no small irony in the fact that the only surviving image of Brunias, an artist whose work underscores the constructedness of social identity, depicts him trying on a foreign persona and that the assumption of this fictional identity may have confused the truth of his own for a century.22 Still, it is impossible to know the extent to which Brunias consciously recognised the artificiality of the racial identities he depicted or how his paintings might have made manifest the constructedness of these identities. What is certain, however, is that, more than two hundred years after they were made, Brunias’s paintings offer insight into the uniquely inchoate moment in the history of racial identity that they represent. The details of Brunias’s biography are important to this book only insofar as they further illuminate the artist’s work or the time and place in which it was created; therefore, I have devoted more time and energy to researching the paintings and the context of their creation than the life of the artist who created them. While I would certainly love to know more about the man who created these fascinating paintings, far better archival researchers than I have done their best to pin down the particulars of Brunias’s biography, establishing a rough sketch of the artist’s life with a few illuminating details, and my own research has yielded little to add to this pool of facts. The historical record remains stubbornly silent when it comes to questions such as Brunias’s personal life in the islands or his relationship with British colonial clients other than William Young. Published biographical notices such as those by Edwards and CroftMurray, auction catalogue entries, and short articles by Neville Connell and Hans Huth published in connoisseurship magazines during the 1960 and 1970s provided important starting points for establishing the basic points of



Introduction

Brunias’s biography. After cross-referencing these with each other, where details seemed dubious, suspicious, or conflicted with other accounts, I factchecked them against extant records and, when all else failed, consulted with other Brunias-philes and used common sense to develop what, I believe, is an accurate, though inevitably spotty, account of the painter’s life. In addition to the aforementioned sources, my understanding of Brunias’s life is greatly indebted to the original research of John Fleming and Lennox Honychurch. Fleming’s inquiry into Robert Adam yielded period records of Brunias’s time in England and his relationship with the Adam brothers (albeit from Robert Adam’s perspective).23 Additionally, the archival research and critical insights of the noted Dominican historian Honychurch have provided invaluable information about the artist and the colonial Caribbean he would have encountered. Where tantalising speculations – those of others or my own – could not be verified, I have offered them to the reader as just that: enticing hypotheses with provocative implications that are worth considering but are impossible to confirm. Given that Brunias’s deceptively quaint and beautiful canvases do much to obscure the harsh realities of life for people of colour in West India’s colonial plantation economy, it is somewhat ironic that, after having endured a difficult boat passage from Italy to England, the artist washed up on foreign shores and into the historical record dedicated to the service of his own unbending master, the famed British neoclassical architect Robert Adam, and that Adam clearly regarded Brunias as little more than a slave. Obviously, drawing any sort of direct comparison between Brunias’s experience in Adam’s employ and that of the enslaved Africans who survived the Middle Passage to labour in the Americas is both highly problematic and, perhaps, even irresponsible. The two situations are not comparable. However, as will become more evident in the following chapters, it is important to recognise the uncertain terms of Brunias’s relationship with the Anglo-Protestant elite who employed him both in England and in the colonies, and to consider how this might have informed Brunias’s vision of the people of colour whom he painted. Although ostensibly white-skinned, Brunias was an Italian, a Roman Catholic, and a hired hand existing on the periphery of the upper-class British and Anglo-Caribbean circles with which he was affiliated as an employee. In this respect, the artist had, perhaps, more in common with the free people of colour who conspicuously dominate so much of his Caribbean oeuvre, their French Catholic culture (a legacy of earlier French attempts at settlement and colonisation of the islands where Brunias worked) having much in common with that of his native Italy. Therefore, Brunias occupied a perhaps unique liminal position between the elite culture of his British patrons and that of the free coloured population, one that might, in part, account for his distinctive Caribbean vision.24 Moreover, much like the Caribbean inhabitants who are

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the focus of his paintings, most of the details of Brunias’s life must be gleaned from the records of those for whom he laboured. Born in Rome about 1730, Brunias was reared and academically trained there. A pupil at the Accademia del Disegno di San Luca, in 1752 he won third prize in the institution’s second class among the field of religious subjects for his painting Tobias and the Angel, now lost. Upon leaving the academy, he apparently made his living painting souvenir pictures for well-to-do Europeans making the Grand Tour and caught the eye of Adam, who would eventually rise to fame as one of Britain’s most celebrated architects and an innovator of British neoclassical design. The son of the successful Scottish architect William Adam, Robert had high ambitions for improving upon his father’s legacy. In 1754 he left Great Britain to begin studies on the Continent, working most notably with Charles-Louis Clérisseau. In 1757 Adam and Clérisseau embarked upon an architectural pilgrimage to Italy. Italy represented the capstone of a professional education for the aspiring architect Adam; moreover, always business-minded, he banked on the fact that the portfolios he prepared there would set him apart in the minds of potential clients in Britain and assure the success of the London office he hoped to open upon his return. To that end, Adam was especially keen to assemble a collection of drawings documenting the antique ruins he surveyed in Italy, paying particular attention to decorative motifs and architectural details that could later be used both as models to present to future clientele and references during the design process. Impressed by Brunias’s drawing skills, during his Italian sojourn Adam hired the artist to work as a draughtsman engaged in just this sort of visual documentation of classical design detail. In fact, Brunias, along with another draughtsman, Laurent-Benoît Dewez, travelled around the country with Adam and Clérisseau for some time and even accompanied them to Spalato (now Split, in Croatia) to survey the ruins of Diocletian’s palace. Adam was so satisfied with – and dependent upon – the work of these two that he determined to bring them back with him to help establish the London office: I have a young lad from Liège that is become my greatest draughtsman, is active, exact, expeditious and attentive. This lad I intend to bring to England and make him overseer of the Firelines or line-drawers. Then I have one for ornaments, for landscapes and figures and other things of that nature, who will prove very useful and who I shall likewise plant in London.25

Dewez, the ‘young lad from Liège’, Adam described later as his ‘plan man and line drawer’. Brunias, who the architect acknowledges had been ‘bred a painter’ but was ‘converted into an architect’ by Clérisseau and himself, applied his skills more to figures and ornaments.26 Brunias and Dewez were the inaugural members of the large stable of draughtsmen, painters, and decorators who maintained the increasingly



Introduction

ambitious Adam family architectural empire, managed principally by Robert with his brother James. Architects frequently worked as contractors and even sub-contractors, overseeing the design details of a project above and beyond the structure of the building. However, affecting the ‘Adam style’, as it came to be known, required an unusual amount of involvement on the part of the architectural firm regarding such elements as interior painting, decor, and furniture selection to achieve an overall aesthetic. Actually achieving this aesthetic was accomplished not so much by the brothers themselves as by their assembly of a team of reliable draughtsmen, painters, and artisans of diverse description. In fact, according to Adam scholars Joseph and Anne Rykwert, Adam’s ‘most obviously striking quality’ was not his creativity or skill as an architect but his ‘brilliant management’.27 While the Rykwerts’ work most effectively elucidates the role of these workers in the Adam brothers’ increasingly ambitious architectural enterprise, John Fleming’s scholarship, particularly his review of Robert Adam’s papers, illuminates the architect’s opinions of the underlings he employed. Adam’s own words reveal the deeply contradictory feelings that shaped the dynamics and relations of power between the architect and the employees upon whom his success depended. Not entirely unlike the plantation slaveholders that Brunias would encounter in the West Indies, Adam unequivocally considered himself inherently superior to his employees on the one hand, yet also acknowledged his complete and utter helplessness without them on the other. Clearly aspiring to something greater than the provincial Scottish architectural reputation that his father had established, Adam had his heart and his sights set upon London and understood Brunias and Dewez as essential to the success of his London plans. Objecting to his brothers’ requests to avoid any commitment to employing Brunias and Dewez in England, he argued: at London there is not one who knows my manner of drawing nor would learn it in two years. And then the very name of bringing two Italians will do more than he [Robert’s brother, presumably James] is aware of … These two [Brunias and Dewez] Clérisseau and I have actually bred and to have allowed them to fall into other people’s hands would have been our own ruin and destruction. I really would not have the courage to settle in London without them.28

Thus, while simultaneously indicating his inability to function without them, Adam’s insistence that ‘the very name of bringing two Italians’ (even if one was actually Liégeois) would help make the firm’s reputation suggests that he saw them as trophies to some extent. Moreover, his letters demonstrate his generally low opinion of those he employed, illustrating that he regarded them as little more than his mindless possessions. He frequently called Dewez ‘my Liégeois’ while Brunias was known as ‘his Italian’;29 Adam referred to

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the two of them together as his ‘two young myrmidons’.30 However, these demeaning epithets aside, Brunias and Dewez were held in high esteem in comparison to the lowlier artists in Adam’s employ. In fact, referring to less well-regarded members of his collection of workers in Italy, Adam explicitly calls upon the language of slavery, and one can hear in his words the echoes of the voices of slaveholders who regarded those who they held in bondage as subhuman. For example, Adam refers to ‘an Italian lad [not Brunias] who does all the drudgery business of putting things in proportion from sketches, but … [who he regards] in no esteem but as a daily slave at one shilling per day’; another draughtsman he calls a ‘beegle’ and ‘the most worthless dog I ever knew but draws my ornaments to perfection’.31 I want to reiterate that I am not claiming, in any way, that Brunias was Robert Adam’s slave. I point to rhetorical echoes here between West Indian slaveholders and the words of Adam regarding his employees, which would have reflected a not uncommon perspective of employers vis-à-vis their hired hands in eighteenth-century London, to illustrate the uncertain terms of labour that Brunias and his fellows encountered. While the plight of enslaved people and that of free white workers in England were not equivalent to any extent, the fact that the language of slavery was commonly used with reference to workers in Britain is significant, as is the constant invocation, in the raging debates over abolition, of the relative merits or disadvantages of slavery versus wage labour and other forms of servitude.32 Moreover, in addition to Adam’s opinions of those in his employ, their own uncertainty about their status and the terms of their work must be considered relative to debates about labour, including slavery, in Great Britain at the time. Adam scholar Eileen Harris cites Joseph Bonomi, who Adam hired on a subsequent trip to Italy and who became noted as an architect in his own right, as claiming that he and others employed in Adam’s London office were bound to seven-year terms during which he ‘could do nothing, not even for [his] own use, under a penalty of paying them (Messrs. Adam) £200:0:0’.33 While Bonomi and two others agreed to stay for a second term, others in the Adam brothers’ employ, tired of such exploitation, left after their first term of service. One striking episode took place in December 1758 when Dewez, the premier Adam draughtsman along with Brunias, fled London for Brussels: at this juncture when friends, business and hurry threaten to take hold of me, has the Liégeois thought fit to take to his heels and have gone off to Brussels without warning or without even telling Brunias of his intention. This morning I received a letter from him from Dover telling me that as I had used him as a slave he imagined I had authority to do so and says he always suspected some paper that I had desired Brunias and him to sign witness to when you was in London in February was a paper that made him a slave and that till such time as



Introduction

I would send him an attestation by the hand of a notary public that no writing made in England could be brought against him he would not return back, so begs an immediate answer. If I could do without such a wretch you may be sure I never would hear of him again, but he knows my manner of drawing and I have nobody to supply his place…34

Adam’s letters and Dewez’s concern that he had been conscripted into some sort of slavery suggest something of the working conditions under which he, and presumably Brunias, laboured after leaving Italy for England in 1758. In fact, in speaking of the merits of bringing artists from abroad to the London office, Adam added that ‘They [specifically referring to Brunias and Dewez] speak nothing but French and Italian so have no chance of being soon debauched by evil communication, which is no small advantage.’35 In other words, being unable to communicate in English, they could not be encouraged to advocate for better wages or proper credit for their work. As Adam operated his office much like a workshop, the architect was and continues to be directly credited for the work of his draughtsmen, including Brunias. The preface to a 1987 book produced by Britain’s National Trust about the designing of Kedleston Hall, Robert Adam and Kedleston, notes that ‘perhaps the least known, and most beautiful, of all items lent from the house was an exquisite watercolour by Robert Adam, a design for a “painted Breakfast Room” … that showed one of Britain’s greatest architects at the height of his powers’.36 However, the text then nonchalantly acknowledges that this work and other ‘Drawings given to Robert Adam should be understood as emanating from his office, and thus produced by carefully supervised draughtsmen (such as Agostino Brunias…)’.37 The exquisite watercolour in question (fig. 3), which incidentally was also the cover art chosen for the book, is, in two other Adam monographs, attributed unequivocally to Brunias.38 Regarded as ‘[o]ne of the greatest of all English country houses’, Kedleston Hall was and is considered among Adam’s crowning achievements,39 and Adam’s papers document Brunias’s intense involvement in the Kedleston project. Brunias played no small role in the design programme for the famed painted breakfast room at Kedleston, renowned for its innovative style which resulted from the freedom of design that Adam was granted there.40 Discussing Adam’s signature use of colour (which decidedly rejected the colour theories of Winckelmann typically associated with neoclassical design), Fleming credits Brunias’s influence on Adam’s style, referring to the ‘colour schemes developed by Brunias that Adam had admired and written about so enthusiastically’; moreover, speaking in terms that suggest the architect and his employee as collaborators, Fleming observes that ‘[i]f nothing else, this room showed Adam’s and Brunias’ understanding of the

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3

Attributed to Agostino Brunias for Robert Adam, ‘Design for the Painted Breakfast Room in the Family Pavilion’, one of three designs in pen, ink, and watercolour by Robert Adam in 1760

­­ importance of colour and their readiness to experiment’.41 Surely, Brunias – whose academic training as a painter drew upon the great antique and Renaissance models and who put his work forward for exhibition with the Free Society of Artists in 1763 and 1764, the Society of Arts in 1770, and the Royal Academy in 1777 and 1779 – thought of himself as more than a mindless brush for hire.42 Moreover, he, no doubt, resented being regarded as such by others. For example, Honychurch suggests that disputes with Adam over proper pay and fair credit for his work led Brunias to seek his fortune in the Caribbean when the opportunity arose.43 Though he almost certainly worked for others during his West Indian sojourns, Brunias’s primary benefactor in the West Indies was Sir William Young, 1st Baronet.44 A Scotsman like many of the other settlers of the Windward Islands, Young had been appointed to the Commission for the Sale of Lands in the Ceded Islands and was the body’s president. Escaping his troubles with Adam in exchange for the promise offered by a new patron in the so-called New World, some time between 1764 and 1770 Brunias accompanied Young on an expedition to the Caribbean as the aristocrat’s personal artist, ostensibly hired to capture life in these islands, the newest jewels in the British crown.45



Introduction

A man of influence in the British West Indies, Young served in various official colonial capacities during the eighteenth century, including terms as governor of St Vincent and Dominica, and was made baronet in 1769, four years after his arrival in the Caribbean. During his eight years of primary residence in the islands, from 1764 to 1773, Young amassed a small West Indian empire of his own, no doubt using his position on the land commission to reserve some of the best pieces of real estate for himself. He eventually owned three sugar plantations in St Vincent (including the legendary Calliaqua) as well as two in Tobago, two in Antigua, and one in Dominica. At the time of his death in 1788, his combined holdings were valued at £200,000.46 His son, also named William, whose edition of his father’s writings on the Carib Wars in St Vincent is referenced extensively in the first chapter of this book, inherited his title and the plantations. To Brunias, he bequeathed a mourning ring and fifty pounds sterling.47 As Chapter 2 will discuss in greater detail, eighteenth-century artists working for British interests in the colonial West Indies were often charged with supplying absentee planters living in Britain with pictures of their Caribbean holdings, providing evidence of their wealth in the form of forts, ports, and plantation landscapes. Rarely did they train their brushes on the various communities of colour residing there. British planters, seeking to elevate rather than implicate themselves, wanted pictures of their land – not the brown bodies they had exterminated or extirpated to usurp it, the black bodies they had transplanted to work it, or the yellow ones whose existence they had had a role in creating upon it. However, Brunias’s work focuses virtually exclusively on Caribbeans of various colours – Red and Black Caribs, Africans and AfroCreoles, and people of mixed European and African ancestry – marking his oeuvre as unique within the realm of eighteenth-century colonial Caribbean visual production. Moreover, Brunias’s romance with Caribbeans of colour, perhaps not limited to the easel, may have extended to intimate relationships as well. Based upon a number of archival records, including baptismal records for two illegitimate mixed-race boys, born in 1774 and identified as Edward and Augustin Brunias, Honychurch speculates that Brunias, like so many European men who sojourned in the islands, was intimately connected with a woman of colour there, and evidence indicates that the artist started a family with a mixed-race woman in Dominica.48 This speculation seems confirmed by the numbers of mixed-race people of the Bruney family in Dominica who trace their ancestry back to an Italian surveyor who worked for the British government in the late 1700s and whom they identify as one and the same as Brunias, the artist.49 Whether or not Brunias had a romance with a West Indian woman, he must have fallen in love with the islands. Although William Young quit the West Indies for Britain for good at the end of 1773, Brunias returned to England

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only for a few years during the 1770s. He apparently lived in London’s West End, listing addresses at 20 Broad Street, Carnaby Market, and 7 Broad Street, Soho during the late 1770s, and he exhibited paintings – West Indian scenes probably completed in London – at the Royal Academy in 1777 and 1779.50 During this brief return to England, Brunias completed beautiful engravings after his paintings with elaborate dedications to military and colonial officials that showcase his technical prowess as an engraver as well as a painter. His use of stipple technique allowed him to emphasise subtle gradations of skin colour just as he had done in his paintings. His time back in Britain was short lived, however, and by 1784 Brunias was apparently back in St Vincent completing a commission of botanical drawings for the St Vincent Botanical Gardens. According to the record of his death, ‘Agustin [sic] Brunias natif de Rome’ died on 2 April 1796, in Roseau, Dominica, at the age of sixty-six. An inevitably brief Brunias historiography

Agostino Brunias was not, by any accepted definition of the term, an artistic genius. He was not at the forefront of an avant-garde movement; he did not rise to fame and fortune during his lifetime, nor did his precious canvases garner widespread admiration even after his death. Indeed, it may not even be fair to say that Brunias’s work attracted any sort of cult following worthy of note until the last few decades. Brunias’s primary significance, however, exists not in his technical or aesthetic innovation but in his unique imagining of the British colonial project in the West Indies during the late eighteenth century. Whereas so-called artistic geniuses may develop a vision too original to function as an index of a particular culture, artists of the middling sort frequently create works that provide precisely this sort of information, and serve as touchstones of the ideological imperatives operating in the cultures for which they are produced. Brunias’s work, therefore, offers valuable insight about how his patrons – wealthy plantation owners and colonial officials – imagined the coloured inhabitants of the West Indian islands. In their depiction of colonial Caribbeans of colour, Brunias’s paintings inevitably tell us more about how Britons saw themselves and understood their relationship to the joint projects of slavery, colonialism, and Empire that so profoundly defined their existences than they do about the actual lives of the Caribbean’s indigenous, enslaved, and free coloured populations against whom these existences were defined. Moreover, Brunias was unique in the way that he accomplished this task, providing his patrons with pretty pictures that reflected their own ideas but also offered the possibility of a different interpretation that potentially undermines them. Because Brunias was not widely regarded as a painter of any great significance, little has been written about him. Moreover, most of what has been



Introduction

written (much of it with the aim of piquing interest for upcoming auctions of his work) concerns itself less with a critical analysis of the artist’s oeuvre than with biographical details and a summary of the work’s ‘exotic’ subject matter. Just twelve years after his death, Brunias received a brief mention in Edward Edwards’s Anecdotes of Painters who have Resided or been Born in England (1808). However, the entry is primarily biographical, lacking the ‘Critical Remarks on their Production’ that Edwards’s title page promises, though it does mention Brunias’s interest in Caribbean subjects and paintings featuring the ‘amusements’ of West Indian ‘negroes’. Brunias continued to receive small mentions in biographical dictionaries and catalogues of British painting, including Algernon Graves’s important Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their Work (1905) and Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760–1791 [and the] Free Society of Artists, 1761–1783 (1907) and the aforementioned Decorative Painting in England, 1537–1837 (1970) by Edward Croft-Murray. The first critically significant investigation of the artist’s work, however,  appeared in 1890 when E.-T. Hamy wrote about Brunias for the inaugural issue of the journal L’Anthropologie. In ‘Alexander Brunias, peintre ethnographe de la fin du XVIIIe siècle, courte notice sur son oeuvre’, Hamy describes his chance encounter in 1888 with four unframed Brunias works ‘representant des scènes exotique qui me parrurent curieuses’.51 Presaging the general mode in which Brunias’s work would be understood and appreciated for more than the next century, Hamy describes Brunias’s pictures as at once exotic and meticulously accurate. He names the artist among the first ‘ethnographic’ painters and praises the documentary quality and detail of Brunias’s work: ‘Tout l’ensemble de l’œuvre de notre peintre ethnographe est d’ailleurs, je l’ai dit déja, d’une exactitude quasi scientifique, dont ne se préoccupaient guère les peintres de 1780.’52 Hamy’s high opinion of the ethnographic value of Brunias’s work apparently had little influence on the esteem in which the artist was held by historians of art, however, and with the exception of brief mentions in dictionaries and catalogues, there was little to no discussion of the artist in the secondary literature for more than a half century. Hans Huth broke this silence in 1962, publishing a brief but important article, ‘Agostino Brunias, Romano, Robert Adam’s “Bred Painter”’ in the December issue of The Connoisseur, a periodical intended primarily for dealers and collectors. Huth, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago and researcher of the Institute’s painting catalogue, was inspired to write the piece by the museum’s acquisition of a Brunias painting in 1953. At the time, the work had been entitled American Plantation and erroneously attributed to Richard Wilson.53 Huth’s extensive background research uncovered what even he acknowledged were ‘scrap[s] of knowledge about Brunias’s early

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life’54 including his training in Rome and the drawing by Joseph Vien, and it was he who established, once and for all, the now conventionally accepted form and spelling of the artist’s name as ‘Agostino Brunias’.55 In 1971 Neville Connell, then director of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, published two articles in Antiques, another journal with a readership of primarily dealers and collectors, on the general subject of colonial era prints of the West Indies, the first of which featured only an illustration of a print which may or may not be after Brunias, while the second included several paragraphs about the artist that drew extensively on Huth.56 The work of the Oxford-trained anthropologist and native of Dominica Lennox Honychurch made pioneering advances into the study of Brunias and his oeuvre. Honychurch, who works on an impressively broad range of topics relating to Caribbean history and culture, first encountered Brunias in the work for his doctoral thesis at Oxford and has been a committed Brunias scholar ever since, writing the first pieces on the artist to bring biographical details together with some critical discussion of his artistic production and the social and historical milieu in which it was created. Drawing on archival records related to the Young family, Honychurch’s work has done much to flesh out the relationship between Brunias and Sir William Young, and he was the first scholar to subject the artist’s work to any sort of critical visual analysis, attending separately to Brunias’s portrayal of aboriginal Antilleans, Chatoyer and the so-called Black Caribs, and people of African descent, both dark-skinned and visibly of mixed race. After publishing a brief article ‘Agostino Brunias, a Precursor of Gauguin’ in 1975, Honychurch lectured on the artist periodically before publishing ‘Chatoyer’s Artist: Agostino Brunias and the Depiction of St. Vincent’ in the Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society in 2004.57 Moreover, the scholar has made the findings of his research widely available to the public through a website that he maintains and which is dedicated to promoting the art, culture, and history of Dominica.58 The first to include a critical analysis of any significant length on  Brunias’s work in a scholarly book, Beth Fowkes Tobin devoted a chapter  of her important 1995 book Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting to a discussion of the potentially subversive  power  of the dressing practices of colonial Caribbeans of African descent  as represented in Brunias’s paintings.59 As the title of her Brunias chapter,  ‘Taxonomy and Agency in Brunias’s West Indian Paintings’, demonstrates, Tobin  places Brunias’s art squarely within the context of the  eighteenth-century Enlightenment-inspired project to catalogue the natural world. Moreover, inspired by scholarship in fields such as performance theory and postcolonial studies, particularly the work of thinkers such as Homi Bhabha and Dick Hebdige, Tobin analyses the costumes



Introduction

c­­ aptured by Brunias’s brush to investigate the potential of dress as subversive performance. Accepting and expanding upon the ethnographic designation assigned to Brunias by Hamy more than a century before, Tobin locates Brunias within the conventions of eighteenth-century natural history. She understands his work as the visual equivalent to the ‘customs and manners’ sections of literary iterations of this tradition and emphasises the taxonomic quality of the artist’s paintings without significant complication. I agree that the raison d’être for Brunias’s paintings, as ostensibly expressed by the patrons and demonstrated by the way in which they have conventionally been titled, has everything to do with Enlightenment concerns about classification and empiricism. However, as I argue throughout this book, I subscribe to quite a different view of the documentary value of Brunias’s paintings, asserting that they cannot be described as unequivocally typological or ethnographic, and I detail how the paintings differ from the conventions of so-called ethnographic artwork concerned with racial typology. My work on Brunias’s oeuvre builds significantly upon the insightful scholarship of Kay Dian Kriz, published first as an essay in Felicity Nussbaum’s 2003 anthology The Global Eighteenth Century and expanded upon as a chapter in her own 2008 book Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840. Like Kriz, I analyse Brunias’s images as images, thinking about them more as constructed representations of Caribbean life than as documentary ones. Kriz trains her attention on the conspicuous prevalence of mixed-race women in the artist’s work, considering this pervasive presence especially in light of the vexing role that such figures played in both Caribbean perception and reality. Ultimately, Kriz argues that ‘Brunias mobilizes the mulatress’s ambiguous social and racial status – her in-betweenness – in order to represent civilised society “under development” in a place more commonly associated with base pleasures and profit-taking.’60 Expanding upon Kriz’s work, in Chapter 3 I assert that, for Brunias, the multivalent figure of the mulatress emerged as the quintessential Caribbean body because of her ability to represent both potential refinement and those baser pleasures popularly associated with colonial life in the West Indies. Kriz is also the first scholar to allude to the fact that reading race in Brunias’s paintings is not always the unequivocal task that the more conventional characterisation of his works as racial ‘field guides’ would suggest.61 Indeed, the discrepancy between the way that she and Tobin read the same figure in one Brunias picture – Tobin describes the woman as unqualifiedly white, while Kriz asserts that she is, in all likelihood, of mixed race – piqued my curiosity and interest in uncovering more figures like this ambiguously raced beauty within the artist’s work. Though Kriz contends that this woman

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of questionable racial designation ‘is an exceptional figure within the artist’s oeuvre’, I have found several other examples.62 These form the foundation for Chapter 4’s consideration of anxieties around racial ambiguity and whiteness in the British colonial Caribbean. In putting my own ideas into conversation with those of other recent scholars who have explored Brunias and his world, I aim to build upon and broaden the current scholarship on his work to present a more comprehensive picture of the artist’s oeuvre. While I certainly hope that Colouring the Caribbean will be accepted as the definitive text on Brunias for some time to come, I also hope it will not be understood as closing the book on Brunias once and for all. Instead, in offering new interpretations of Brunias’s paintings and examining heretofore unexplored aspects of his work, I hope this book will encourage scholars and students to continue to reconsider both the significance of Brunias’s images in particular and, more generally, what light the study of art and visual culture can shed upon the histories of slavery, colonialism, and Empire and the construction of race in the Atlantic world. A few words on word choice

Racialised terms, freighted with the weight of history, are never neutral. Whether I refer to myself as a negress, a coloured girl, a black woman, a Black woman (with a capital ‘B’), an African American female, a woman/person of colour, a woman/person of African descent, a Creole of colour, a womanist, a Nubian queen, or an Afrikan sistah, the choice I make conveys more than simply gender or skin colour, suggesting something of how I think about myself with regard to history, politics, geography, culture, and social class. Therefore, I make no pretence about the neutrality of the terms I have used throughout this book. In general, I have aimed to be respectful of the humanity of Brunias’s subjects and mindful of the implications of particular terms without being overly pedantic. For the most part, I have used twenty-firstcentury racial terms, making a number of necessary adjustments to accommodate Brunias’s eighteenth-century subject matter. After surveying the field and finding no one term dominant and not being able to determine any real consensus regarding the most appropriate term to refer to the original inhabitants of the West Indian islands (outside of Canada where ‘First Nations’ is clearly preferred), I have taken the liberty of using a diverse array of terms relatively interchangeably to describe such peoples throughout this project. These include, for example, ‘Native Americans’, ‘indigenes’, ‘Amerindians’, and ‘Indians,’ and, where appropriate, more specific terms such as ‘Carib’ and ‘indigenous Antillean’. The variety of terms available for use here provided a welcome respite from the verbal constraints felt elsewhere.



Introduction

In general and strictly for the sake of clarity, I have used the term ‘black’ to refer only to dark-skinned individuals of African descent and not to those who would be considered ‘coloured’ or ‘mulatto’ by eighteenth-century West Indian standards, regardless of whether these individuals might be considered or might consider themselves ‘black’ today. Without a hard and fast standard like the odious and unforgiving paper bag test of yore, ‘dark-skinned’ may be in the eye of the beholder, but after living with a multitude of Brunias images for more than the last decade, I believe I know Brunias’s ‘black’ when I see it. I am not unaware of the irony of this statement given my arguments in this book. However, Brunias’s black and Red Carib figures represent distinctive entities in his oeuvre specifically because they are readily identifiable, constituting the hard lines that underscore the murky boundaries of the other types of figures: Black Carib, mixed-race, and even, vexingly, ‘white’. I have used the term ‘Afro-Creole’ to describe people of African descent raised in the West Indies to distinguish them from ‘Africans’ born and raised in Africa, while the terms ‘Afro-Caribbean’ or ‘Afro-West Indian’ refer to both groups together unless otherwise noted. More dated and loaded terms such as ‘negro’ are generally used only in quotations or for intentional rhetorical effect. The exception to this is my use of the term ‘negress’ in Chapter 3. After giving the issue quite a bit of thought, I concluded that the raced and gendered connotations of ‘negress’ best correspond to those of ‘mulatress’, a term decidedly employed throughout the book because of its own connotations and the inability of any other term to capture as precisely the ideas that Brunias aimed to convey in paint. Unless there was a persuasive reason to assume otherwise, I have generally assumed that Brunias’s Afro-Caribbeans were not of free status and have tried to follow the now preferred convention of using the adjective ‘enslaved’ rather than the noun ‘slave’ to refer to such individuals (again with the exception of quotations or examples used for explicit rhetorical effect). I have also employed the terms bondspeople, bondsfolk, and the like interchangeably with nouns modified by ‘enslaved’ for variety. In the same vein, I have generally employed ‘slaveholder’ and ‘planter’ over ‘master’ to describe those who did the enslaving. The terms ‘mixed-race’ and occasionally ‘mulatto’ refer to figures of African and European ancestry. The Gallicised ‘mulatress’, commonly used in the titles of Brunias’s paintings to refer to mixed-race women, has also been employed, especially to reiterate the exotic connotation of its original usage. Following the popular usage of the day in the British West Indies, unless otherwise indicated, ‘mulatto’ does not refer to a combination of black and white ancestry in any particular mathematical proportion but to any person of obviously mixed racial heritage, including those who in other places or other times or by some racial stickler insistent upon precision in classification might have

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been referred to as a terceron, a quadroon, a griffe, or a morisca. Except when referring to a free person, male or female, of colour I have tried to avoid the use of ‘coloured’ or ‘of colour’ as these terms have had more longevity than some of the others and have had various, differently freighted meanings at different times and in different places (e.g. ‘person of colour’ means something very different in the United States today than it did in St Domingue in 1790). An exception to this is my use of the phrases ‘West Indians of colour’ and ‘Caribbeans of colour’ to refer to Brunias’s subjects – Carib, black, and mixed-race – collectively. In the colonial British West Indies, prescriptive ideas about races of men as separate and distinct and about racial identity as fixed and discrete helped to define whiteness as a social commodity. Shoring up the boundaries of white British identity, especially for white Creoles, was an integral part of the colonialist ideological programme. Because this book concerns itself particularly with the context of the British West Indies, I have favoured ‘British’, ‘the British’, and ‘Britons’, using the more specific designations of ‘English’ or ‘Scot’, etc., where necessary. Recognising that, in the eighteenth century, ‘white’ did not function as a designation that referred equally to all those of exclusively European heritage and that some who were ostensibly ‘white’ considered themselves whiter than others, where I have used ‘Caucasian’ or ‘white’ (interchangeably), ‘British white’ should be understood unless otherwise noted. Just as ‘Afro-Creole’ refers to black people raised in the islands, ‘white Creole’ refers to Britons who were island born and raised. The historian Douglas Hamilton, in Scotland, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820, has observed that while the connotation of ‘planter’ suggests high birth, grand estates, fabulous wealth, and a luxurious lifestyle, in reality many ‘planters’ did not hail from elite circles in Britain and were seeking to make their names and their fortunes in the islands. Nevertheless, while there was certainly some elitism among whites in the islands, social boundaries there tended to collapse somewhat in the face of the colonies’ black majorities, making friends and neighbours of those who might never have met, much less socialised together, in Britain. Indeed, whiteness made allies of a sort even of those French settlers who remained after the islands were ceded to the British (and who, almost certainly, were allowed to stay, in part, because they helped increase the declining white population at a time when the mixed-race community was growing). Although the French enjoyed only very limited political participation (and at times were deprived of even this), the British recognised a shared interest with the French in perpetuating the white racial dominance upon which the system of slavery – and, therefore, their fortunes – depended, and the British and French ‘shared in the economic and social dominance’ their whiteness afforded them. Moreover, the significant opportunities for economic and social mobility that the islands



Introduction

afforded their white inhabitants meant that all whites aspired to be ‘planters’ in every sense of the word, whether or not they actually possessed such wealth or status or could ever reasonably hope to have it. Therefore, I have used ‘planter’ to describe those who might claim all that it connotes legitimately as well as the aspirants. ‘Plantocracy’ refers specifically to the collective power of planters and colonial elites and the systems put in place to secure and perpetuate that power.63 Referring to Brunias’s works by title poses its own set of issues with regard to language. Brunias’s paintings do not bear original titles, and I know of no painting definitively or even probably titled by Brunias himself.64 Most of his works have been titled by collectors, auction houses, or museum curators to reflect the perceived racial identities of the featured figures (or, somewhat less often, the ‘ethnic’ activity captured in the image). This practice proves problematic on a number of levels. First and quite significant given the concerns of this book, as Chapter 4 will demonstrate, one viewer’s white ‘lady’ may be another’s ‘mulatress’. However, the title of a work informs the experience of looking and has the potential power to predetermine and, in fact, overdetermine the viewer’s perception of a figure’s racial identity and the scene at hand. Additionally, the standard convention for naming Brunias’s paintings means that many of the works bear bland, unimaginative, or awkward titles (for example, Three Caribs outside a Native Hut or A Lady and a Mulatress with a Negro Servant Standing in Back). Such titles, in my view, elide important differences between works that are nominatively of the same subject (the artist’s many ‘mulatress’ pictures, for example) and make Brunias’s oeuvre appear more uniform and typologically driven than it actually is. Sometimes no definitive consensus exists regarding a painting’s title, particularly as the titles of some works have evolved to reflect the changing times. For example, an image once known as a West Indian Dandy and Two Ladies now bears the more politically correct title Free West Indian Dominicans. Unfortunately, the well-intentioned practice of retitling Brunias’s paintings to steer clear of racial terms that might potentially offend the modern ear or to avoid the appearance of legitimising racialised hierarchies sometimes results in even longer and more phonically clumsy titles than the original ones, and further confuses the already challenging task of devising a definitive catalogue raisonné. The similarity of the titles given to Brunias’s paintings elicits inevitable confusion about the size of his corpus. With several different works known as Linen Market or Handkerchief Dance and the same work known by multiple titles, it is hard to determine precisely how many works are extant and how many were once known and are now  lost, especially as entries in early auction catalogues are not ­­accompanied by images.

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Despite the limitations of the titling conventions for Brunias’s works, I have tried to avoid exacerbating an already challenging situation by opting to keep titles as I have found them rather than adding yet another title to the mix. Where multiple titles for the same work exist, I have simply chosen the title I found the most fitting, trying to balance clarity, sensitivity, and phonic fluidity. I have followed this practice of using a previously given title with two exceptions: in instances where the given title both varies significantly from the standard convention and offers the reader no substantive information about the work (as in a series of paintings each known only as Colonial Scene) and when the title includes language so generally offensive to the modern ear that I felt uncomfortable including it in my text (for example, French Mulatress Purchasing Fruit from a Negro Wench). In these cases I have devised my own titles modelled on the general convention of naming Brunias’s works, marking them with an * and including the original title either in-text or in a footnote. Finally, I initially resisted the term ‘New World’, hesitant to reinforce the notion that Europeans had discovered something ‘new’ when, in 1492, they encountered the islands on which people had made their homes and developed vibrant cultures for thousands of years. However, I have ultimately come to embrace ‘New World’ as descriptive of the unprecedented reality that this encounter created and that is ultimately the focus of my scholarship. The world that Agostino Brunias’s paintings sought to capture – born of economic greed, sustained by slavery, dependent upon white supremacy, and distinguished by unparalleled diversity – was, indeed, one that had never before been seen. Notes 1 While almost certainly not a portrait, Brunias’s genre study of this mixed-race planter and his wife defies the modern viewer’s expectation regarding the wealth and status of people of colour in the Caribbean. Although some free people of colour did eventually manage to secure plantations and even enslaved people to work them, restrictions placed upon free people of colour by colonial administrations across the region such as exclusion from political participation, prohibition from owning large tracts of land, and limited work opportunities precluded the vast majority of them from rising to the station of the couple that Brunias presents. Consequently, they did not comprise a significant proportion of the planter population. Therefore, it makes sense that, although Brunias frequently painted mixedrace men and women in elegant dress, this picture represents a bit of an anomaly. In no other extant work does Brunias present a mixed-race couple of such obvious status as the singular focus of the picture. For a comprehensive accounting of the economic and social position of free people of colour in the Windward Islands, see Bernard Marshall, ‘Social Stratification and the Free Coloured in the Slave



Introduction

Society of the British Windward Islands’, Social and Economic Studies, 31.1 (1982), pp. 1–39, www.jstor.org/stable/27861974 (accessed 16 May 2017). 2 The memo can be found in the Brunias clippings file at the Yale Center for British Art. 3 ‘Mr. Mellon’ is Paul Mellon (1907–99), American philanthropist, Anglophile, and British art collector, who donated the building, primary art collection, and endowment with which the Yale Center for British Art was established. 4 ‘Prof. Thompson’ is Robert Farris Thompson, esteemed professor of the art and culture of Africa and the Afro-Atlantic world. 5 As a scholar whose training included a significant amount of gender and sexuality studies work and queer theory – and as being a queer woman of colour myself – I struggled with this issue (although, as I express in the Coda to this book, I was not fully aware of the extent of it until I had finished the first draft of the main chapters). Ultimately, however, I decided to let the sources available to me dictate how I framed my interpretations. I did not feel comfortable speculating about how viewers who left behind no trace of how they perceived Brunias’s paintings and for whom contextual evidence also offers little insight on this matter might have understood the painter’s images. See, for example, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s scholarship which I discuss in the Coda. 6 Kay Dian Kriz’s groundbreaking scholarship on Brunias also observed the necessity of considering his work from a variety of viewer ­perspectives. She admonishes, ‘It is all too easy to assume that Brunias’s images were designed to appeal to heterosexual men, but they equally, if perhaps more surreptitiously, invite the gaze  of  white women, who might fantasize about “possessing” (in either sense) a body that is so closely associated with “dark” sexual pleasures.’ Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 55. 7 The general view of Brunias as the ‘plantocracy’s painter’ was explicitly articulated in the title of a breakout session on Brunias at the conference coinciding with the opening of YCBA’s 2007 Belisario exhibition, and has been expressed, albeit to different extents and with varying degrees of scholarly rigour, in virtually every critical analysis of his work. 8 See, for example, Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward  the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York: Norton, 1977), first published by University of North Carolina in 1968, and the impressive body of scholarship by Kim F. Hall. 9 Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in EighteenthCentury British Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 3–4. 10 Ibid., p. 9. 11 For example, the historian Douglas Hamilton observes that ‘By the eighteenth century, the sight of multi-racial gangs of labourers, once a common feature in seventeenth-century Barbados, was unthinkable.’ See Douglas Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 35.

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12 Angela Rosenthal, ‘Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture’, Art History, 27.4 (2004), p. 579. 13 Kay Dian Kriz, ‘Marketing Mulatresses in the Paintings and Prints of Agostino Brunias’, in Felicity A. Nussbaum (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 206. Kriz published a revised and expanded version of this essay as a chapter in her own book Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement. 14 James Pope-Hennessy, Sins of the Fathers: A Study of the Atlantic Slave Traders, 1441–1807 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), p. 14. 15 See, for example, the text for catalogue entries 163 and 164 in Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (eds), Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 458–459. 16 Those of Brunias’s paintings for which eighteenth-century titles survive, such as the ones at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, often employ the Gallicised term ‘mulatress’, from the French mulâtresse, to refer to the mixed-race women they portray rather than the more common English forms such as mulatto or mulatta. As I argue later, this probably has much to do with implicating the French and absolving the British from participation in interracial sexual activity. Where I have employed ‘mulatress’ I have done so in order to capture the connotations that the term would have originally carried or for intentional rhetorical effect. 17 My work on Brunias began in 2005 and primarily engages with the version of Kriz’s Brunias essay in the 2003 Nussbaum anthology. The version of the essay  that appears in Kriz’s own 2008 book, published long after the completion  of my chapter on mixed-race women in Brunias’s art, offers a slightly revised  argument more in line with, but certainly not identical to, my own. While Kriz’s main argument remains the same in both versions of the essay, near the end of the book version she offers a sentence that concedes that the mulatress might  represent both potential refinement and the baser pleasures to be enjoyed in the islands: ‘Brunias’s images held out to their viewers … the promise of refinement without relinquishing the baser pleasures of the flesh.’ My scholarship expands upon this notion. See Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 64. 18 Emphasis added; a photocopy of the original manuscript record ‘At a Meeting of the President and Fellows of Harvard College, Nov. 15, 1790’ is in the Brunias clippings file at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, Harvard University. 19 Emphasis added; Edward Edwards, Anecdotes of Painters who have Resided or Been Born in England (London: Luke Hansard & Sons, 1808), p. 65. 20 Edward Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting in England, 1537–1837, vol. 2 (London: Country Life, 1970), p. 177. 21 Ibid. 22 The Vien portrait is the only surviving image that claims, itself, to be a portrait of Brunias. However, both Lennox Honychurch and Joan McMurray speculate



Introduction

that Brunias might have inserted his own self-portrait into his works. See Lennox Honychurch, ‘Agostino Brunias’, www.lennoxhonychurch.com/brunias.cfm (accessed 23 November 2016), and Joan F. McMurray, ‘Agency in the Paintings of Agostino Brunias or Reading the Graphic Text’, paper given at the Eleventh Annual Eastern Caribbean Island Cultures Conference, Curaçao, 6–8 November 2008. 23 See John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle in Edinburgh and Rome (London: John Murray, 1962). 24 Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-Ruiz (eds), Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, p. 459. 25 Adam quoted in Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 216. This second man, the painter of ornaments, landscapes, and figures, is Brunias. 26 Ibid. 27 Joseph and Anne Rykwert, The Brothers Adam, The Men and the Style (London: Collins, 1985), p. 98. 28 Adam quoted in Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 217. 29 Ibid., p. 216; James Adam quoted in Doreen Yarwood, Robert Adam (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1970), p. 92; emphases added. 30 Adam quoted in Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 242. 31 Adam quoted in Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 216. 32 I would like to thank David Bindman for encouraging me to clarify my thoughts on this issue. 33 Joseph Bonomi quoted in Eileen Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 2. 34 Adam quoted in Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 369. 35 Ibid., p. 216. 36 Leslie Harris, Robert Adam and Kedleston: The Making of a Neo-Classical Masterpiece (London: The National Trust, 1987), p. 7. 37 Ibid., p. 14. 38 Both John Fleming and A. A. Tait attribute the work to Brunias. 39 Harris, Robert Adam and Kedleston, p. 7. 40 For more information on the free hand given to Adam with regard to this assignment, see Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam, pp. 22–23. 41 Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 97; emphasis added. Brunias also contributed at least five paintings to the Kedleston breakfast room. Painted using an experimental technique that did not hold up well over time, they were removed when the room was dismantled in 1807 and were subsequently acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum which displays them in the British galleries with direct attribution to Brunias. The extant works indicate that each panel featured a pair of classically inspired female figures interacting with each other in a landscape setting. In three of the extant pictures, classical decorative features such as columns and vessel-topped plinths centre the landscape. However, a third depicts the two women – one standing, the other kneeling – with a basket of fruit between them, similar to several of Brunias’s Caribbean compositions (see, for example, fig. 24).

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42 For documentation of Brunias’s participation in these exhibitions, see Algernon Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts; a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation, Volume 1 (London: H. Graves and Co., Ltd [etc.], 1905–06). 43 Honychurch, ‘Agostino Brunias’, n.p. 44 The Young Baronetcy of North Dean in Buckingham County was created on 2 May 1769 for this William Young. His son, also called William Young, was 2nd Baronet. In addition to the sheer number and wide dispersal of his paintings, the fact that Brunias dedicated his engravings to colonial elites in addition to Young and that collectors besides Young (Gardiner, for example) owned his Caribbean pictures as early as the 1790s provides a clear indication that Young was not his only client. 45 The exact date of Brunias’s departure for the Caribbean remains uncertain despite vigorous efforts to pin it down. Honychurch claims that Brunias first travelled to the West Indies with Young in 1764; however, Croft-Murray finds the artist, in the years 1766–67, carrying out a decorative commission under the direction of William Chambers for Lord Clive’s Berkeley Square house in London. 46 Honychurch, ‘Agostino Brunias’, n.p. 47 Ibid. 48 Honychurch bases this speculation upon records he discovered at the Roseau Cathedral in Dominica recording the baptisms of ‘Edward and Augustin two illegitimate children born on the 1st October 1774 of Louis Bruneas and a free mulatto woman’. Additionally, he cites tax records of 1827 that indicate that one Elizabeth Brunias owned a small estate, worked by eleven slaves, that produced 1,225 pounds of coffee that year. Honychurch wonders whether this Elizabeth might be the painter’s daughter or even the mother of his children and offers that the presentday ‘Bruney’ family of Dominica may be Agostino Brunias’s descendants. 49 Given the ubiquity of rape, sexual coercion, and less than voluntary concubinage relative to West Indian slavery and colonialism, my characterisation of Brunias’s relationship with at least one woman of colour as ‘romantic’ requires explanation. In the final months of preparing an early draft of this manuscript, I was contacted by Wendel Thomas, a member of the Bruney family of Dominica. Thomas confirmed that he considers Brunias his forebear and that, according to family lore, property that has been in the family for generations was originally given to Brunias through a land deal that he had with the government (of course, his patron Young was, in effect, the government) and that this tract was later inherited by the mixed-race mother of Brunias’s children, a fact that would coincide with Honychurch’s findings. According to Bruney family oral history, Brunias’s longstanding relationship with the free woman of colour who was their ancestor was more than a casual affair (Wendel Thomas, e-mail communication with the author, 10 and 11 June 2009), and I have tried to be sensitive to the family’s own understanding of their history in my choice of language. However, the dynamics of interracial relationships between white men and women of African descent in the islands makes it difficult to characterise any of these relationships as unproblematically consensual, an issue that I address significantly in Chapter 3.



Introduction

50 On Brunias’s return to London, see Neville Connell, ‘Colonial Life in the West Indies as Depicted in Prints’, Antiques (May 1971), pp. 732–737. 51 E.-T. Hamy, ‘Alexander Brunias, peintre ethnographe de la fin du XVIIIe siècle, courte notice sur son oeuvre’, L’Anthropologie 1.1 (1890), p. 49. 52 Ibid., p. 55. 53 Hans Huth, ‘Agostino Brunias, Romano: Robert Adam’s “Bred Painter”’, The Connoisseur (December 1962), p. 269. 54 Ibid., p. 266. 55 The decision regarding Brunias’s name seems to be originally derived from the record of his participation in the annual competition at the Accademia di San Luca where he was known as ‘Agostino Brunias, Romano’; see Huth, ‘Agostino Brunias, Romano’, p. 265. 56 See Neville Connell, ‘Early Printed Views of the West Indies’, Antiques (January  1971) and ‘Colonial Life in the West Indies as Depicted in Prints’, Antiques (May 1971). ‘Early Printed Views of the West Indies’ features a print, Vue de la Ville, du Port, et des Habitations de Basse-terre, dans Isle de St. Christophe prise de la Rade, attributed to the engraver I. F. Miller after Brunias. The image in the article is too small and grainy to ascertain a definite attribution; however, I would question whether it is after Brunias. As I discuss at length in Chapter 2, while other colonial artists concentrated on topographical views and picturesque landscapes, Brunias was exceptional in devoting his work, almost exclusively, to the depiction of people. Moreover, in the few instances when Brunias did paint a primarily landscape picture he always included small figures – miniature versions of the bathers, dancers, and promenaders – recognisable from his more typical work. See Chapter 2 for images and further discussion. 57 Lennox Honychurch, ‘Agostino Brunias, a Precursor of Gauguin’, The Bajan and Southern Caribbean Magazine (June 1975), and ‘Chatoyer’s Artist: Agostino Brunias and the Depiction of St. Vincent’, Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 50 (2004), pp. 104–128. 58 Lennox Honychurch, ‘Dominica: Art, Culture. History & Resources’, www.len​​ noxhonychurch.com (accessed 23 November 2016). 59 Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in EighteenthCentury British Painting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 60 Kriz, ‘Marketing Mulatresses’, p. 198. 61 Tobin makes precisely this suggestion; see Picturing Imperial Power, p. 146. 62 Ibid., p. 206. 63 Marshall, ‘Social Stratification and the Free Coloured’, pp. 6–9. In addition to a very useful discussion of the status of free people of colour that particularly informs Chapter 3, Marshall offers general discussion about social stratification in the Windward Islands, including both the potential for economic and social mobility among whites and the recognition by the British of their shared interests with white French settlers. 64 As I have already acknowledged, this book focuses on Brunias’s oil paintings. The artist did, however, publish two series of engravings during his brief return to England, one in 1779 and one in 1780, that bear both dedications and d ­ escriptions,

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for example ‘This plate (representing a cudgeling match between English and French Negroes in the Island of Dominica) is humbly dedicated to Sir Ralph Payne, Knight of the most honorable Order of Bath by his most obedient and devoted Servant A. Brunias.’ While the descriptions do generally include information about the racial designation of the figures, they tend to focus more on the activities shown in the scene, suggesting the importance of narrative in the artist’s work. Incidentally, in the example given, there is no discernible visual difference between the English and French ‘negroes’.

Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black: race-ing the Carib divide

In 2002 the government of St Vincent proclaimed the eighteenth-century Carib warrior Chatoyer a national hero. A chief among the so-called ‘Black’ Caribs, Chatoyer led valiant campaigns against British colonial forces during the two Carib Wars (1772–73 and 1794–98) that were the dramatic culmination of the Carib/British colonial contest. Recently, the hero’s bold image has emerged as an emblem of local pride – reproduced in promotional tourist literature, adorning the covers of recuperative histories of the Black Carib people,1 and even featured on the front of a popular phone card. Chatoyer has come to embody resistance against colonial oppression in the collective memory of the Vincentian people and among those who identify as Black Caribs in particular.2 Ironically, however, the artist who recorded the likeness by which modern-day Black Caribs venerate Chatoyer as a national hero was, in fact, employed by the very oppressors that the Carib leader and his people so fiercely resisted. In a recent popular culture image (fig. 4) Chatoyer, clad in loincloth and headwrap, stands in heroic profile smoking a long pipe. Despite the absence of solid ground beneath him, his strong stance makes his muscular legs appear firmly rooted, rendering the stick upon which he rests his hand more a symbol of authority than a source of support. Declarations printed in underscored arcs radiate from the warrior’s head, proclaiming him the ‘Chief of Chiefs’ and St Vincent’s ‘1st National Hero’. This iconic depiction represents the hero remembered with pride by those who identify as Black Caribs today. However, cropped from the original context, the iconic Chatoyer tells only part of the story. The original source of the figure, Agostino Brunias’s Chatoyer the Chief of the Black Charaibes in St. Vincent with his Five Wives (fig. 5; hereafter Chatoyer with his Five Wives), circulated widely through an engraving by Charles Grignon that appeared in Bryan Edwards’s epic colonialist tome The history, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies.3 In this picture, the same pipe-smoking Chatoyer from the ‘Chief of Chiefs’ image supervises a procession of five female Black Caribs as they progress along a

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4

Unknown artist, 1st National Hero, Chief of Chiefs, c. 2000

path amidst a densely wooded landscape. The three women at the rear of the line stoop under the weight of their heavy loads, carried in the traditional Carib manner in woven pegals.4 Paused in front of them, the second in the procession bends over the fallen load at her knees, repacking her carrier, while the leader of the female party, wearing a baby slung in a fabric carrier across her breast, stands at the front. She faces her husband, the bent knees of her pose echoing his own. Rather than portraying Chatoyer as the leader of an army of fearless Black Carib warriors, Brunias shows him as the tyrannical overseer of an army of ill-treated wives in an image that highlights the polygamy of the Black Caribs and the drudge-like treatment of their women that Britons, rather hypocritically given the rampant sexual abuse of enslaved women by British colonists, found abhorrent.5 Despite the less-than-flattering light in which Chatoyer with his Five Wives depicts the ‘1st National Hero’, there can be little doubt as to why those seeking to recuperate Black Carib history and pride found it a more apt source than the alternative. The other visual work for which Chatoyer reputedly was an original model, Brunias’s Treaty between the British and the Black Caribs* (fig. 6), commemorates the adoption of the treaty that concluded the First Carib War.6



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

Charles Grignon after Agostino Brunias, Chatoyer the Chief of the Black Caribs in St. Vincent with his Five Wives, 1801

Showing a delegation of scantily clad Black Caribs who have cast their weapons on the ground at their feet, the scene specifically illustrates the provision of the treaty in which they agree to ‘acknowledge his Majesty [King George III] to be the rightful sovereign of the island … take an oath of fidelity to him as their King; promise absolute submission to his will, and lay down their arms’.7 Chatoyer, a few inches taller than his Black Carib brothers, stands chin in hand, attentively listening to the terms of the treaty as explained by another Black Carib who ostensibly acts as a translator. He leads the dark-skinned group, their nearly naked, muscled black bodies contrasting sharply with those of the British officials whose pale-faced, white-coiffed figures are outfitted from head to toe in pristine white uniforms topped by bright red coats with shiny gold buttons. Contemporary accounts describe Chatoyer and his brother du Vallé (also called Duvalle or Du Valle) as ‘well dressed’ and even

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refer to the latter as ‘the founder of civilization among’ his people.8 Therefore, the visual contrast achieved by the comparison of bare black bodies and clothed white ones must be regarded as a deliberate move by Brunias meant to highlight the Black Caribs as savages next to the refined image of the civilised British soldiers, one of whom is pictured conspicuously reading from the treaty document in an action that further underscores his civility.9 Brunias’s composition effects a similar contrast through the juxtaposition of the Black Caribs standing against a setting of uncultivated, undeveloped Vincentian wilderness with the placement of the British representatives against a background of finely constructed tents that portend the establishment of a colonial settlement. The sharp division of the canvas into two distinct sides – black and white, savage and civilised – when read from left to right, creates a narrative of colonial ‘progress’. Brunias’s use of contrasts in this painting recalls Benjamin West’s famous work William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (fig. 7), an image with which the artist might have been familiar.10 West’s painting employs similar compositional devices regarding the underscoring of contrasts and division of space, juxtaposing a gathering of gaily garbed and elaborately ornamented Delawares

6

Agostino Brunias, Treaty between the British and the Black Caribs, oil on canvas, 56 x 61 cm



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

43

with a sober and drably dressed Quaker delegation led by Penn, and allocating two-thirds of the canvas to a clearly illuminated, burgeoning British colonial settlement, while relegating the Indian village to the shadowy margin of the picture. Moreover, like West, who fails to meaningfully distinguish the leader of the band of anonymous Delawares with whom Penn negotiates, Brunias does little to signify Chatoyer’s considerable status. His image of the leader certainly bears none of the hallmarks of a portrait, depicting the Black Carib hero as just another dark-skinned man in a loincloth. Stephanie Pratt astutely observes that, by the eighteenth century, British dealings with indigenous peoples had provided them with a knowledge of Indian culture that offered artists a number of modes of visual representation beyond the hackneyed ‘noble savage’ (or, in the case of the Black Caribs, ‘ignoble savage’). The fact that Brunias does so little to distinguish Chatoyer’s status among the Black Caribs is significant given the range of representations of indigenous leaders, particularly portraits, in eighteenth-century British art and visual culture. 11 Although some historians argue that the conclusion of the First Carib War actually amounted to a stalemate, Brunias clearly documents it as a moment of surrender, with Chatoyer considering the terms of his people’s ­­ submission. Interestingly, although Brunias’s painting almost certainly represents ­­ the

Benjamin West, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, 1771–72, oil on canvas, 191.8 x 273.7 cm

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Black Caribs, who were far from ‘pacified’ during the late 1700s, the image has conventionally been known as Pacification with the Maroon Negroes, the misleading title under which it appeared in the Edwards book, where it was ostensibly meant to represent a coming to terms between the British colonial government and the Jamaican maroons. As this chapter will illuminate, however, it is no coincidence that within a few years of this work’s creation, the so-called ‘Black’ Caribs of St Vincent, as rendered by Brunias, would be mistaken for Africans and Afro-Creoles eluding bondage. Setting the stage for a drama of division: a brief history of colonial St Vincent

A complicated and contentious history, particularly centred on the beginning of the British settlement of St Vincent in 1765 and the subsequent wars between the Caribs and the British that followed, informs an understanding of Agostino Brunias’s paintings of Carib groups.12 According to popular mythology, Columbus landed at St Vincent on 22 January 1498 and named the island in honour of the feast day of Saint Vincent of Saragossa; however, the explorer is known to have been in Spain at that time, and, in fact, no evidence exists to suggest that he ever visited the island.13 Before the eighteenth century, St Vincent was primarily occupied by a series of indigenous American groups including the Ciboney and, later, the Carib, who migrated from South America and also intermarried with Africans who, whether by providential shipwreck or self-determined escape, had eluded the yoke of European enslavement. The Caribs generally resisted European attempts to settle the island – which they called Hairouna, or ‘home of the blessed’ – and consistently thwarted the colonisation efforts of the British, Dutch, and French. However, they eventually allowed limited settlement of the western part of the island by the French, probably as a defensive move against more aggressive British attempts at colonisation, and by 1719 some French settlers had begun smallscale cultivation of crops such as coffee, indigo, tobacco, and sugar.14 In 1748 Britain and France agreed to consider St Vincent as outside the reach of either nation’s imperial aspirations, excluding the island from the list of potential spoils in their colonial contest.15 The territory was thus regarded as neutral and ‘effectively in the possession of the Caribs’.16 Upon the conclusion of the Seven Years War, however, the British, empowered by their victory, abandoned this policy. Turning an imperial eye towards the island, they saw new possibilities for colonial expansion in St Vincent and dispatched commissioners to survey the area and divide it into plantations for sale. However, the British colonial project in St Vincent encountered a substantial obstacle to its success: the Carib people in general and the so-called Black Caribs in particular. As early as 1730, census reports recorded the population regarded as ‘Negro’ as around 6,000 while the Carib population was said to



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

number 4,000 (no estimates were given for the white or mixed-race population), data that indicates both the significant presence of people of African descent on the island and a tendency to regard them as separate from the Carib population in the European mind.17 According to Peter Hulme, from 1770 onwards British planters’ accounts consistently divided the Carib population into two supposedly discrete groups, Red and Black.18 Colonial settlers and officials described the western half of the island as inhabited by a small population of Red Caribs who enjoyed the protection of French colonists, while the eastward part of St Vincent, containing the most fertile lands coveted by the British, was reportedly occupied by a considerably larger number of Black Caribs.19 While different sources offered slightly varying accounts of the so-called Black Caribs’ origins, the consensus held that during the midseventeenth century a ship carrying Africans bound for New World slavery had been wrecked near the coast of St Vincent and its human cargo was taken in – and, in some accounts, temporarily enslaved – by the Red Caribs with whom they subsequently mixed.20 The merger of this group with existing colonies of maroons who sought refuge from enslavement in St Vincent’s mountainous terrain is also a standard part of this narrative.21 Relying particularly on the views expressed by Brunias’s principal patron, Sir William Young, as recorded in An Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of St. Vincent’s (1795), this chapter considers the extent to which Brunias’s Carib pictures provided a visual narrative to reinforce the insistent – and, I argue, largely artificial – distinction between Red and Black Caribs made by British colonialists in the Lesser Antilles.22 This is not to deny the existence of significant phenotypic diversity among individuals or various groups that identified as Carib, but to suggest that, to the extent that these differences may have existed, in constructing the Red and Black Caribs as unequivocally separate and distinct groups, the British imagined or, at least, exaggerated the substance and significance of those differences in ways that supported their colonial interests. In this regard, I echo and extrapolate from Peter Hulme’s contention that ‘Black’ and ‘Red’, as ‘applied to Caribs are colonizers’ terms, ideological fictions built around the unmarked centrality of imperial whiteness’.23 Specifically, I assert that by constructing them not as free and legitimate indigenes but as African imposters originally destined for Caribbean slavery, the British colonial regime marked the Black Caribs as rebels, no better than fugitive slaves, who needed to be brought back under British control. This chapter offers a focused study of Brunias’s Carib pictures within the political and cultural context of their creation. In order to provide this crucial context, the chapter begins with an extensive discussion of the unique historical circumstances regarding the British–Carib conflict in St Vincent, giving particular attention to Young’s influential Account of the Black Charaibs, long regarded – and problematically so – as the seminal text on the Black Caribs.

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This is followed by a brief overview of the shifting theoretical discourses around race that inform Brunias’s representation of Red and Black Caribs. After laying this historical and theoretical foundation, I turn more specifically to Brunias’s work itself. Observing marked differences in the artist’s depictions of the two reputed Carib groups and considering the implications of those differences, I evaluate the extent to which Brunias’s paintings work to visually reify the Red/Black distinction that colonialists insistently asserted but imperfectly articulated. Ultimately, I contend that Brunias’s depictions of Red Caribs constructed a rather monolithic colonialist narrative of them as authentic indigenes. The artist’s pictures portrayed them as racially and culturally pristine relics of St Vincent’s pre-colonial past whose days – ­­perhaps somewhat lamentably but certainly inevitably – were numbered, a fact conveniently attributed to Black Carib oppression rather than British colonial aggression and one that fortuitously left the island available for settlement. In contrast to the artist’s one-note rendering of Red Caribs, however, Brunias’s portrayal of Black Caribs was more varied, more complex, and more nuanced. On the one hand, his Black Carib works create a perceptible visual difference between them and their Red counterparts. Brunias emphasises the blackness of Black Carib bodies such that they resemble more closely the African slaves who were essential to British colonialist ambitions for St Vincent as a burgeoning sugar colony than they do any European notion of what Amerindians should look like.24 Moreover, in this and in other respects, the artist’s paintings can certainly be read as supporting British perceptions of Black Caribs as a problematic entity in their colonial world and offering a visual narrative to justify the solutions that colonialists developed to deal with them. However, on the other hand, careful analysis reveals the extent to which, while supporting the Red/Black divide, Brunias’s paintings also deviated from the colonialist script that accentuated the Black Caribs’ Africanness such that it completely eclipsed their Carib-ness. Rather than shoring up the boundaries of racial categorisation in the British Lesser Antilles, Brunias’s portrayal of Black Caribs as neither absolutely African nor unadulteratedly Antillean – his visual insistence on their unequivocal mixedness – gestures towards the problematic nature of the racial and cultural distinctions that his paintings ostensibly aimed to reify and points to deeply felt British cultural anxieties about the difficulties of assigning and recognising race and place in colonial island society. Blackened redskins: William Young and the Africanisation of the Caribs

The perspectives offered by Brunias’s primary patron Sir William Young epitomise the perceptual division between Red and Black Caribs that Hulme ­­identifies as the defining ‘center of planter description of the free



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

­­ non-European population of St. Vincent’.25 Young’s extensive writings about the Caribs were compiled and edited from his journals and papers by his son, Sir William Young II, and published as An Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of St. Vincent’s in 1795. Although prefaced by a brief statement by the second Sir William Young in which he expresses that he felt a ‘public duty … to the country at large, and to my brother planters of St. Vincent’s’ to edit and publish the document, Account of the Black Charaibs is presented uncomplicatedly in the manner of a first-hand recollection of the father with no intertextual evidence of the son’s editorship. This makes it practically impossible to disentangle the viewpoints of Young the elder from those of Young the  younger, whose perspective would have been significantly informed by the experience of the Second Carib War, a bloody, four-year conflict that marked a serious deterioration in British–Carib relations that his father did not live to see. The text does include full quotations of several original documents from the 1770s that, like Brunias’s paintings, demonstrate that the Red/ Black divide certainly did exist at that point; however, they also suggest that the full-scale demonisation of the Black Caribs evident in the Young account more accurately characterises the late 1780s and 1790s. Therefore, this chapter proceeds with the understanding that the recollection of events of the 1770s and 1780s related in Account of the Black Charaibs is significantly coloured ­­ by the events and zeitgeist of the mid-1790s, thus offering a particularly dark assessment of the Black Caribs that possibly represents an exaggeration of the views held by Brunias’s patron. Asserting a sharp distinction between the two Carib communities, Young’s Account described them as ‘two nations of people very different in origin and pretensions’.26 The text delivered an unforgiving diatribe against the Black Caribs while offering a sympathetic view of the plight of the Red Caribs, whose survival Young portrayed as threatened by Black Carib oppression. Published at the height of the Second Carib War, Account of the Black Charaibs obviously aimed to muster support for the colonialist position and to prevent the upsurge of sympathy for the Caribs that had precluded a plantocratic hard line during the First Carib War.27 Moreover, despite its obvious bias, as Hulme and the contemporary Caribbean historian Michael Craton both note, Young’s account remained the principal source on the Black Caribs until the late twentieth century. I do not wish to perpetuate the dominance of Young’s Account of the Black Charaibs as the principal primary historical source on events regarding British relations with the Black Caribs in the late eighteenth century. However, given that the first Sir William Young employed Brunias, it is more than reasonable to assume that the artist designed his work to appeal to the colonial official’s sympathies and, therefore, that an understanding of Young’s views, albeit through his son, will provide critical insight when interpreting the artist’s paintings. This chapter uses Young’s Account as a lens

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through which to more clearly see Brunias’s work, as opposed to a historical document based in fact. At the outset of Account of the Black Charaibs, the author makes plain the implications of the observations put forth in the text: that, after extensive efforts to come to terms with the Caribs and in the face of ‘wholly unprovoked’ cruelty and treachery at their hands, the British were left with ‘the sole alternative … of the Charaibs being removed from off the face of the island’.28 Young’s Account meticulously describes the persistent and, in its estimation, eminently reasonable efforts of the colonial government to reach a settlement with the Caribs in the hope of avoiding this extreme measure. However, the text simultaneously creates an alternative narrative to justify the removal of the Caribs: that the majority of them were not really Caribs at all. Young insists that ‘two nations’ occupy the island, which is inhabited by ‘the Red Charaibs, or aboriginal Indians, and by the Black Charaibs, or colony of African Negroes’.29 With this one statement, offered within the first five pages of his treatise, the text conveniently elides the Carib-ness of the Black Caribs, recasting them uncomplicatedly and unequivocally as ‘African Negroes’, thus establishing the persistent theme of the work. The document consistently challenges the ‘Indian-ness’ of the Black Caribs and the subsequent legitimacy of their claims to the island, often referring to them simply as ‘negroes’ or ‘Africans’, that is, no more entitled to autonomy than the black people enslaved on West Indian plantations. For example, in one instance the text makes reference to ‘[t]he Negroes, or Black Charaibs (as they have been termed of late years)’, implying that their Carib identity is a new and invented one and in no way legitimate. Even more explicitly, in a passage describing how the descendants of the shipwrecked Africans united with colonies of escaped slaves, the text asserts: Incorporating with these Negro outlaws [i.e. the escapees], they formed a nation, now known by the name of Black Charaibs; a title themselves ­­arrogated … The savage, with the name and title, thinks he inherits the qualities, the rights, and the property, of those whom he may pretend to supersede: hence he assimilates himself by name and manners, as it were to make out his identity, and confirm the succession.30

Throughout this so-called ‘account of’ the Black Caribs, more accurately described as an ‘invective against’, the text essays to demonstrate that the Black Caribs are not exemplars of noble savagery, asserting that ‘the Blacks particularly [are of] an idle untractable disposition’31 and that their actions during negotiations with the British prove them to be not only shrewd, but duplicitous and downright treacherous as well. In establishing an equation in which the Black Caribs’ African-ness effectively cancelled out their Indianness, Young’s text transformed their dark bodies from sovereign ones whose



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

independence and freedom Britons were bound to respect to renegade ones subject to British control and destined, perhaps, for enslavement or removal. Indeed, the work repeatedly makes reference to what it defines as the Black Caribs’ ‘original state of slavery’, alluding at once to their shipwrecked ancestors bound for New World slavery and their subsequent, albeit quite temporary and ultimately unsuccessful, enslavement by the Red Caribs.32 By repeatedly emphasising their ‘original’ connections to slavery and associating them with ‘Negro outlaws’, Young casts the Black Caribs in the mould of rebelling slaves. Moreover, the text’s incessant reference to the alliance of the Black Caribs with the French, epitomised in the explicit connection it draws between ‘French intruders with Negro usurpers’, underscores an implicit association of the Black Caribs with the Haitian rebels then in the throes of the Revolution on St Domingue.33 Published at the height of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and one year after France abolished slavery in its colonial outposts, Young’s Account presented the Black Caribs as insurgents in a manner that, no doubt, resounded with Britons, both in the colonies and at home, who shuddered at reports of atrocities committed by angry black mobs against white settlers in Haiti. Explicitly raising the spectre of these atrocities, the text elaborates the perfidy of the Black Caribs during the Second Carib War: ‘the attack was so unprovoked, the ravage was so unprofitable, the barbarity so excessive … the route of the savage hord [sic] was literally marked out by a line of flame and massacre’.34 Later, the Account claims to quote Chatoyer, who declares Black Carib intentions towards the British, vowing that ‘we are going to burn their estates, and that we will murder their wives and children, in order to annihilate their race’.35 Through intertextually quoting in full the final ‘Declaration of Chatoyer’, supposedly found on his body when he was killed in battle at Dorsetshire Hill and dated ‘12th day of March and the 1st year of our Liberty’, the Young text explicitly connects these intentions to the influence of the French and the contagious rebellion against established social order that the French Revolution represented.36 The declaration, as quoted by Young, rings with all the echoes of the French Revolution: ‘Where is the Frenchman who will not join his brothers, at a moment when the voice of liberty is heard by them? Let us then unite, citizens and brothers, round the colours flying in this island.’37 Young’s text asserts ‘that suffering the Charaibs to remain in their present state, will be very dangerous, and may at some period prove fatal to the inhabitants of the country’.38 However, the Caribs constituted more than just a physical threat to the British inhabitants of St Vincent. An island on which the British hoped to establish a thriving sugar colony worked by slaves depended upon at least the perception of a strict sense of social and racial order, and could not afford to allow any of that ‘Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité’

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mumbo-jumbo to circulate – especially when espoused by men with dark skin. Subduing the Black Caribs, then, presented British settlers with the opportunity to distinguish themselves from the French through the establishment of a strong sense of colonial order that contrasted with the excessive liberty epitomised by the French, Haitian, and American revolutions. In addition to raising the spectre of a slave revolt, the paranoid ‘blackening’ of the Caribs in the Young Account had another important implication. The work’s implicit insistence on the immutability of a primary racial identity – in the case of the Black Caribs, once an African, always an African and never could a Carib be – also worked to shore up the bounds of all racial identity in a colonial environment in which, as will be explored in greater depth later, charges of ‘Creole degeneracy’ potentially called into question the whiteness of European settlers, and matters of class and caste were not always black and white (or black and red, as the case may be). In this upstart world where colours and cultures collided to an unprecedented extent relative to contemporary Europe, maintaining the perception of rigid boundaries of identity and a subsequent sense of strict social order, one of the hallmarks of ‘civilised’ society, was all the more urgent, and enforcing a racial hierarchy with unequivocal borders represented one important way of doing this. Race-ing the Carib divide: colour, character, and shifting theories of human difference in the late eighteenth century

Young’s Account of the Black Charaibs insistently asserts a distinction between Red and Black Caribs, but what precisely was the substance of this difference? Young’s mobilisation of the doubly darkening description ‘African Negroes’ to refer to the Black Caribs underscores the extent to which plantocratic interests insisted upon an untempered African identity for this group. Painting the brown bodies who called the most fertile areas of St Vincent their home with a tarred brush – marking them as decidedly black rather than red – allowed colonialists to cast them as illegitimate usurpers with no indigenous claim to the island. The coloured terms in which they described the distinction (i.e. Red and Black) imply – particularly to twentyfirst-century ears – a difference of complexion or culture, but the substance of British colonists’ accounts suggests something else. Ironically, the communities that they considered Red and those that they deemed Black were – by their own admission – ­­linguistically and culturally homogeneous, practising identical customs and lifestyles.39 Moreover, by the late eighteenth century indigenous Caribs had been intermingling with both Europeans and Africans for nearly three centuries and ‘would, in terms of appearance, have covered a wide spectrum from the relatively pale to the relatively dark, in accordance with the random ­­relationship between genetic make-up and skin colour’.40



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

Therefore, although the distinction between the two groups might be adamantly declared, it was less easily described. The references to ‘woolly’ hair, thick lips, or other stereotypically ‘negroid’ features that one might expect in descriptions of the Black Caribs are conspicuously absent from British accounts. For example, at no point in Young’s 127-page text does the author ever once emphasise any physical difference between the Black Caribs and their Red counterparts. Indeed, in a rare acknowledgement of the actual mixed-race status of the Vincentian Carib population in general, Young describes the Carib custom, practised by both those deemed Red and those designated Black, of killing male prisoners of war while taking the women as wives and concubines. The author then concedes, ‘To the latter practice of either people is to be attributed the tawney and mixed complexion to be met with occasionally among the Charaibs.’41 Interestingly, while British commentators frequently observed this practice of wife taking, which they regarded as abhorrent and downright savage, Brunias does not record evidence of it in his paintings. No extant work shows, for example, a Black Carib man with a Red Carib woman or the evidently mixed progeny of this sort of war tactic. Instead, the artist’s works consistently portray Red and Black Caribs, always on separate canvases, as two discrete groups – phenotypically distinct and fundamentally different. Brunias’s images of Red and Black Caribs depict each group as conspicuously phenotypically homogeneous and lacking the type of physical variations that would be expected, given accounts of their origins, culture, and intercourse with Europeans. Brunias’s insistence on maintaining two very distinct modes of representation for each Carib subgroup suggests the sort of anxiety regarding the notion of hybridity and race-mixing that will be discussed at length later in this chapter. Ultimately, there seems to have been no consensus about how to tell a Black Carib from a Red one except in terms of general character: in the British colonialist lexicon, ‘Black’, when attached to ‘Carib’, became synonymous with ‘bad’. To what extent, then, did British colonial accounts and Brunias’s paintings reflect demographic and cultural Caribbean realities, and to what extent were they conscious or subconscious fabrications that supported the colonial project in St Vincent? As a provocative counterpoint to British colonial perceptions of Black Caribs as black Africans, Hulme cites the recollections of Moreau de Jonnès, a French soldier who lived for several months in 1795 among a group of Caribs that he regarded as Red. Contradicting British accounts of the political and demographic domination of savage Black Caribs over oppressed Red ones, de Jonnès describes a sort of summit meeting of indigenous leadership during which Red Caribs clearly dominate in both number – 6,000 versus 1,500 – and influence.42 Moreover, in contrast to British accounts of the overwhelming African-ness of the Black Caribs, de

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Jonnès underscores how un-African they appear when he describes, with surprise, his first encounter with a group of Caribs that he regarded as Black: I had not previously seen the [Black Caribs] and from misleading accounts I had formed quite a false idea of them. I believed … that they owed their origin to negro slaves escaped from neighbouring colonies. I was much surprised to find them of quite another race. In place of woolly hair, flat nose, and gaping mouth set with thick out-turned lips, they possessed Abyssinian features: smooth hair, long and black … straight nose … such as you would never see from Cape Bon to the Gulf of Guinea; and finally, a mouth furnished with thin lips in no way like that of a negro, except for the beauty of their teeth.43

De Jonnès’s report, no doubt informed by its author’s own colonial allegiances and ideological motivations, should not necessarily be accorded any more credence than those of Young or other British settlers, especially as it does obviously imply some distinction between the two reputed Carib groups. However, the glaring discrepancies between his report and theirs mean that either the British or the French – and quite likely both – misrepresented the facts to support their own colonial interests, and cast significant doubt upon the veracity of British claims about the so-called Black Caribs. In addition to the varied skin tones that would have characterised those who were considered or considered themselves Carib, the long history of contact between Caribs, Europeans, and Africans meant a significant degree of cultural hybridity as well. However, British accounts consistently describe the Red Caribs as authentic indigenes while characterising the Black Caribs as African impostors whose African ancestry completely negated the significance of their legitimate Carib heritage or culture. Though expressed in terms of Black and Red, the Carib divide reflected not so much a perceived difference of complexion or culture but of character, and, as Young’s characterisation of them demonstrates, Black referred not so much to the colour of Carib skins as to the disposition of their souls. The oft-quoted ‘two nations’ description in Young’s Account, declaring a substantive difference between so-called Red and Black Caribs, employs a simple conjunction, ‘and’, to critically collapse into one idea the two rather distinct concepts – ‘origins and pretensions’ – around which the Red/Black distinction would be erected. Colonialists’ characterisations of Black Caribs theorised an intrinsic and essential difference in character between them and their Red cousins based primarily on their different ancestral backgrounds. Simply put, despite linguistic and cultural commonalities that suggested they were Carib to the core, colonialists enforced the perception of Black Caribs as essentially and fundamentally different from Red Caribs based upon their emphasis on Black Caribs’ supposedly different ancestral background  – and they regarded them as essentially, fundamentally savage because that



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

Unknown artist, Vöelkertafel, mid-eighteenth century

background was African. This notion fitted squarely within the established racialised thinking of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that associated particular places of origin not so much with defining physical traits like skin colour or hair texture as with particular qualities of character. A mideighteenth-century vöelkertafel (fig. 8), or chart of peoples, illustrates the character-dependent typological schemes that had been used to identify differences among various European ‘races’ for over a century. However, the use of visual terms ostensibly referring to skin pigmentation (rather than place of origin) as the primary referent in the construction of the Red/Black divide, juxtaposed with the fact that these terms connoted more about character than they did about colour, suggests the unique and pivotal moment in the history of racialised theories of human difference in which this distinction emerged. Roxann Wheeler describes most of the eighteenth century as a period in which, as the qualitative judgement upon the Black Caribs would suggest, ‘The importance of what people looked like was not quite as fixed as what people did in the determination of difference.’44 Importantly, Wheeler identifies the decade between 1770 and 1780 – the period encompassing the first William Young’s sojourn and Brunias’s primary activity in the Caribbean – as

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a crucial moment in the development of racialised thinking during which skin colour and other elements of physiognomy emerged as primary to Britons’ understanding of humanity and the significance of human differences. Two seemingly incompatible racialised theories of human difference competed for primacy during this transitional period – one founded on cultural assessments based upon four-stages theory, the other rooted in the natural history tradition and descriptions of the physical body. While theories based upon skin colour (and usually skin colour above all other physical attributes) emphasised what people looked like, four-stages theory privileged character and behaviour by classifying people according to an evolutionary scheme of civilisation based on socio-cultural factors such as system of government, attitudes towards property, and treatment of women – a scheme in which, of course, Britain inevitably emerged as the most evolved. Despite the qualitative rather than physical differences that seemed to distinguish the two Carib communities in the colonialist mind, the particular use of the ostensibly physical descriptors ‘Red’ and ‘Black’ reflected the emergent shift in race thinking during the last quarter of the eighteenth century that located difference in colour rather than character. Brunias’s paintings created a visual supplement to verbal pronouncements of Black and Red by putting into paint what colonialist commentators could not clearly put into words. Hulme insists that although ‘linguistically and culturally, Black and Red Caribs were identical, the British planters were still determined that the Black Carib should be seen as distinctly African’ in contrast to the Red Carib who was the authentic Amerindian.45 Although Hulme uses ‘seen’ here to mean ‘perceived’, the construction of Caribbean reality that Brunias delivered in his paintings helped viewers literally to see the two groups in precisely this way. Real Indians are red … and almost dead: Brunias’s construction of Red Caribs as authentic – and ancient – Indians

Brunias’s paintings of Red Carib indigenes support the British perception of them as the ‘real’ Indians in the Caribbean colonial scenario, those whose indigenous rights might have legitimately merited some degree of consideration by the colonists. The artist’s harmonious tableaux, set against pristine tropical landscapes and depicting isolated indigenes with all their genuine Antillean accoutrements, buttress a narrative of Red Carib authenticity, purity, and sentimental primitivism that presages the emergence of the socalled Noble Savage in Anglo-American art and poses a sharp counterpoint to the imitation Indian-ness of the worldly, Black Carib impostors described as unqualified savages in Young’s Account. To a certain extent, this representation of the Red Caribs as a primordial society whose static culture persisted



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

in some isolated Caribbean enclave, removed from all influence of outside contact, seems to have been largely Brunias’s own invention. While British sources tend to underplay the interaction of the Red Caribs with the modern, ‘outside’ world, even Young, for example, admits that they ‘were accustomed to visit [colonial settlements] in their canoes, for purposes of petty traffic in provisions and fish’.46 Indeed, a great deal of the Young narrative considers the problems that arose for the British colonial endeavour in St Vincent due to the previous intercourse of both Red and Black Caribs with the French. Contrary to the picture of Red Carib life that Brunias paints, by the mid-eighteenth century Caribs spoke European languages, incorporated Western clothing into their dress, and adopted many of the elements of European culture. For example, Young describes his meetings with an acculturated Red Carib known as Louis who speaks French as a result of ‘traffic for fish and other articles’, now practises Catholicism, and describes to the colonial official his people’s abandonment of certain traditional Carib practices such as the upright burial of the dead.47 In another example, Hulme cites the 1793 recollection of Jean-Jacques Dauxion-Lavaysse, a French colonist in St Vincent who describes a visit to a Carib called Larose who lived in a house ‘built of squared timber, and covered with shingles’, where he treated the Frenchman to lunch served ‘on fine white table linen, in dishes and plates of Wedgewood, with silver cutlery and cut glass’.48 However, Brunias’s emphasis on the unadulterated aboriginal state of the Red Caribs is not simply a random or completely independent innovation on his part, but represents the visual extrapolation of the inchoate articulations of British colonials, the material fruition of references to the Red indigenes as ‘ancient masters’ and as ‘less robust natives’.49 According to colonialist accounts, these ancient Indians were ‘little equal to a personal contest with the ferocious inhabitants [the Black Caribs]’ who, vengefully bent on their ultimate annihilation, had usurped their rightful territory and perpetrated a staggering decline in their numbers.50 Considering that Sir William Young, 2nd Baronet, the editor of the text, would have intimately known the Brunias works – that, in fact, the artist’s images of Red Caribs were probably indelibly etched into his mind as he edited his father’s papers – Brunias’s paintings and Young’s Account can be understood as mutually constitutive texts. The visual images that the artist created probably informed the colonial spin expressed in the edited account as much as they reflected the perspective of a patron whose ideas the text purportedly represents. Moreover, the harsher view of the Black Caribs that emerged during the Second Carib War, as evident in the Young text, surely shaped the way in which Brunias’s paintings were later perceived. By the time the British assumed control of St Vincent in 1763, Young estimated the Black Carib population at about 3,000 while Red Carib numbers had supposedly dwindled to a mere hundred; ‘so reduced were that aboriginal

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people!’ the text laments.51 In a similar vein, in his chapter on the ‘Charaibes, or ancient Inhabitants of the Windward Islands’, Bryan Edwards refers to the ‘miserable remnant of red Charaibes in the Island of St. Vincent’.52 Brunias’s Red Carib pictures pre-date George Catlin’s images of ‘doomed’ Indians in the United States by roughly half a century; however, their ideological underpinnings presage those of Catlin’s later work as described by the art historian Kathryn S. Hight. Like Catlin’s, Brunias’s paintings ‘can be seen today as presenting the public not so much an ethnological report as a validation’ of their own perceptions of the ill-fated Indians’ inevitable destiny in a way that absolved colonialists of any real culpability.53 British settlers in St Vincent such as Young conveniently attributed the downfall of the ‘true’ Carib race not to their own colonial expansion but to the evil determination of the Black Caribs ‘to destroy the Red Caribs, and carry off their women, and [accomplish] the extirpation of the original Indians’.54 Ironically, the prophesied demise of these ‘ancient masters’ must have actually seemed all but complete by the late 1700s, when racially and culturally pristine Caribs like those painted by Brunias were, in fact, practically extinct, more as the result of transculturation and racial intermingling with both Afro-Caribbeans and Europeans than any romantic notions of inevitable doom or Black Carib oppression. If Brunias’s paintings visualised the authentic Indians who might have posed legitimate obstacles to British imperial objectives, they also recorded an image that contemporary Britons were unlikely ever to see in the flesh, confirming the sense that the islands were ‘free’ to receive the ‘benefits’ of British colonial management. Supporting the image of the Red Carib population of St Vincent as ancient, dwindling, and doomed, Brunias’s paintings of the Red indigenes possess a deceptively documentary quality and uphold the conventions of ethnographic imagery more so than any other group of images in the artist’s oeuvre. No significant innovator in this regard, Brunias, in his concern with the costume, accoutrements, and dwellings of Antillean Amerindians, largely conforms to the model derived by earlier artists of New World indigenes like John White (whose work he might have known through the engravings of Theodor de Bry). Brunias’s renderings of Red Carib people generally present them in an isolated and untouched tropical enclave engaged in mundane daily activities, with all of the authentic Indian ‘stuff’ – loincloths, rudimentary dwellings, crockery, etc. – that, indeed, identifies them as Indians. For this reason, they seem even more uniform and typological than his images of other Caribbean communities of colour, canvas after canvas being populated with virtually identical figures in relatively unchanged settings, engaged in the same quotidian activities. Unlike his images of dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles or mixed-race people, which indicate a generally balanced interest in the rendering of the people themselves and the variety



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

of activities in which they participate (dancing, sport fighting, ­­promenading, buying and selling at market), Brunias’s Red Carib pictures focus almost exclusively on the indigenes themselves and their relationship to the undeveloped island landscape. Ultimately, where Brunias’s black and mixed-race figures portray genre types, his Red Caribs represent ethnographic-type specimens; their stiff bodies and lack of vigorous activity render them – like wax sculptures or taxidermy models – frozen in time. Accordingly, the profusion of detail with which the artist typically infuses these works, in conjunction with the relative meticulousness with which those details are rendered, creates an aura of authenticity achieved through the ostensibly faithful portrayal of a conveniently absent and probably entirely unfamiliar referent.55 Underscoring the pristinely primitive state of nature in which these indigenes live, Brunias’s Red Carib works convey precisely the sort of knowledge considered relevant to the budding field of what was then called natural history and would eventually develop into anthropology – information about eating and sleeping habits, domestic arrangements, work, leisure, dress, etc. However, far from being the straightforward ethnographic visual documents they purport to be, like all of Brunias’s West Indian works, his Red Carib pictures amount to a selectively piecemeal construction of Caribbean reality generated for a British colonialist audience, images less reliable as representations of how things were than of how the British saw them or, at least, wanted them to be. Unique among the artist’s pictures of Red Caribs for the number of figures and variety of items included in the painting, A Family of Charaibes in the Island of St. Vincent (fig. 9) is nonetheless perfectly representative of the many images Brunias created on a smaller scale to depict this group of Caribbean inhabitants (see, for example, fig. 10). Moreover, it serves as a particularly useful example because it reproduces in a single image many of the standard features included in the smaller works. The painting depicts four adult females and two males with two children. Despite their apparent polygamy and the difficulty of precisely identifying the family relationships portrayed, the scene, located in a clearing set against an idyllic forest background, conveys a sense of domestic harmony. Famiglia Indiana Caraiba (fig. 11), an image from John Gabriel Stedman’s 1796 Narrative of a Five Years Journey Among the Revolted Negroes of Surinam that depicts a Surinamese Carib family, indicates that Brunias’s depiction of familial harmony among Indians was not exceptional in the British visual culture of the late eighteenth century. Although the classically articulated body of the father stands counterpoised and slightly apart from the rest of the family, they are nonetheless a unit, a notion visually reiterated by the compositional balance achieved in the closed grouping of the mother and two children. The family’s matriarch holds a baby on her hip, supported by a fabric carrier slung

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across the front of her body. She drapes one arm around the child’s waist, wrapping the other arm around an older daughter who leans into her mother. The older child’s hand reaches up to grasp her younger sibling’s wrist which rests on the mother’s breast. The girl’s heavy pose mimics the position and weight of the baby sling against the solid support of the mother’s stable body, while the tender gesture creates a double ‘x’ as the older girl’s upstretched arm crosses first the diagonal drape of the baby carrier and then her sibling’s arm. Together the three figures form a perfectly balanced tangle of bodies and arms to which the father’s body is joined, angled in front such that he and the daughter almost appear to share a lower leg. Brunias also underscores a sense of familial harmony by the careful balance of his composition, doing so to an even greater extent than is evident in the Stedman image. Two women, each paired with a child of indeterminate sex, centre the work, both of them turned slightly inward towards the left of the painting. This four-figure group is balanced on either side by two male/ female pairings who frame the central cluster like quotation marks. Each of these bookend pairs contains its own internal sense of balance as well, with the two figures in each pair turned to face each other. Furthermore, taken together, the four figures that comprise the two outer couples represent an

9

Agostino Brunias, A Family of Charaibes in the Island of St. Vincent, oil on canvas, 22 x 24 in. (56 x 61 cm)



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

Agostino Brunias, A Leeward Islands Carib family outside a Hut, c. 1780, oil on canvas

omniscient observation of the Red Carib body, presented to the viewer like specimens for study: front and back, right and left sides.56 The similarity of all of the figures, each rendered in the exact same tawny shade and clad – to the extent that they are clad at all – in identical neutral tones accented with bright red, also contributes to the overall sense of harmonious tranquillity that the painting communicates.57 Presaging, albeit in two dimensions, the ethnological displays that would become the hallmark of natural history museums in the next century, Brunias

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11

Attributed to Cristoforo dall’Acqua after John Gabriel Stedman, Famiglia Indiana Caraiba, c. 1801–50



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

presents his Red Carib specimens in their ‘natural habitat’ with all the req­ uisite features of native life and foregoes the generalities associated with genre in favour of specific detail. For example, only in these works does the artist take care to represent the West Indian landscape with any degree of accuracy. In general, he is content to allow a lone palm tree or two to mark the scene as Caribbean, otherwise leaving the flora unidentifiable or imprecise.58 However, in this work the specific species represented can be clearly identified as the heliconia (also known as balizier or baliri) to the left and a native palm tree in the centre of the work, both indigenous to St Vincent.59 Brunias’s exceptional attention to accurately depicting indigenous flora here supports the notion of the Red Caribs as the legitimate native inhabitants of St Vincent. Similarly, the structures in the painting are not simply generic ‘huts’ but particular constructions of identifiably Carib origin. Honychurch identifies the larger structure to the left of the painting as a taboui and the open-front dwelling with the hammock draped across the front as a mouina.60 Likewise, the women’s costumes, particularly the elaborately woven reed bark adornments wrapped around their lower legs, are distinctively Carib, as the enlarged calves such bindings created constituted a primary signifier of feminine attractiveness by Carib standards. Brunias’s classical training is evident in the well-proportioned figure of the muscular Carib man standing in front of the taboui with his back to the viewer. Poised contrapposto, a simple bow and a few arrows in his hand, he might be a Caribbean Apollo. However, his rudimentary weapons, relics of an ancient time, reinforce the archaic nature of a scene that is steeped in melancholy resignation regarding the inescapable end of the way of life that it depicts, rendering him more pathetic artifact than heroic warrior. Classical allusions in images of people of colour, particularly American Indians, were common in eighteenth-century British culture and did not necessarily signify the sense of inevitable demise that I attribute to Brunias’s work here. The classical idiom provided European artists with a familiar mode of imaging the unclothed body that would not be received as vulgar by their viewers, and the classicisation of Amerindian bodies constituted such a routine and flexible convention in eighteenth-century British visual culture that it was just as apropos for conveying the quiet dignity of the Noble Savage, the brave heroism of an Indian leader, or the brutal savagery of a native enemy as it was the doomed plight of Brunias’s Red Caribs.61 While the classicising of Native American bodies can be seen at least as early as the sixteenth century in the de Bry engravings after John White, this mode of representation, closely associated with eighteenth-century art, had sunk to the level of hackneyed convention by the end of the 1700s. As Stephanie Pratt acknowledges, ‘Famously, the classicization of American Indians was an eighteenth-century creation and something of a cliché by the end of the period.’62 The ­­identification

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of American Indian braves and the classical Apollo was so entrenched as to become the stuff of art historical legend. Upon first seeing the Apollo Belvedere, Benjamin West, who was well acquainted with Native Americans from his upbringing in Pennsylvania, reputedly exclaimed, ‘My God! How like it is to a young Mohawk warrior!’63 However, Brunias’s Indians have none of the vigour associated with a Mohawk brave or hunting Apollo. Not animated as West imagines the Mohawk-like Apollo Belvedere to be, they are never imagined in pursuit of game or mounting a vigorous defence of their homelands. Instead, lazing about their rude homesteads, Brunias’s subtly classicised Amerindian bodies appear laden with the weight of the ages, like antique sculpture itself, frozen relics of the past. This effect worked in conjunction with the explicitly Carib details of the painting, ostensibly teaching viewers how to recognise a ‘true’ Carib while also emphasising the Indians’ archaic existence. Brunias’s meticulous documentation of every ‘authentic’ detail implies the urgent need to capture this information for posterity. The Red Carib works evoke a sort of nostalgia for their subjects’ simple life while underscoring the primitive evolution of their society and the inevitability of its demise. Simply put, these naked indigenes living in their cosseted settlements of haphazardly cultivated land – the antithesis of modern colonial progress – belong solidly to the past. The only good Indian is a Red Indian (and they’re practically extinct anyway … and it’s not our fault!): mapping an age-old divide-and-conquer strategy on to the Lesser Antilles

Paintings such as Family of Charaibs reinforced colonialists’ assessments of the Red Caribs as not only the true Indians but the good ones as well. In asserting this difference between Red/real/good Caribs and Black/bogus/bad ones, British colonialists did not reinvent the wheel. Practically from the moment that Columbus arrived on Antillean shores, Europeans developed a vision of the Americas in which their relationships with its indigenous peoples were based upon an assessment of the essential character of a given group of indigenes as either good or bad. Such assessments also informed their ideas about relationships between different Indian groups. Not surprisingly, the goodness or badness of a particular native group had a direct correlation to their receptiveness to European colonisation or usefulness in European alliances, and, by the last decades of the 1700s, the so-called Black Caribs’ stubborn occupation of the best growing lands in St Vincent and their historic ties to the French clearly marked them as bad Indians as far as the British were concerned.64 The Red (good)/Black (bad) divide conformed to perceptions of Native Americans in the European mind forged in the days of Columbus and altered to fit the mid-to-late eighteenth-century context. The letter penned by



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

Columbus upon his return voyage to Europe and directed to the clerk of his primary patrons Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain had an enormous impact upon European perceptions of the so-called New World and the notion of good and bad Indians.65 He describes his initial interactions with the indigenous peoples he encounters as peaceful and optimistically portrays them as timid, childlike, and guileless – in other words, easily colonised: The people of this island and of all the other islands which I have found and of which I have (or do not have) information, all go naked, men and women, just as their mothers bore them … They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they fitted to use them; not because they are not well built and of handsome stature, but because they are extraordinarily timorous … incurably timid … after they become reassured and lose this fear, they are so guileless and so generous with all that they possess, that no one would believe it who has not seen it. Of anything they have, if they are asked for it, they never say no … they are immediately content with whatever trifle of whatever kind may be given to them.66

Without, for the most part, explicitly acknowledging European colonial ambitions, Columbus uses glowing terms to praise these Indians in ways that create a perception of Amerindian guilelessness that could be worked to European advantage. From the vantage point of European aspirations, Columbus’s letter paints a picture of ideal Indians who will willingly turn over all the riches that the West Indies have to offer to colonisers whom they fear too much to fight and against whom they could not, given the primitive stage of development indicated by their nakedness and their lack of weapons, even mount a credible defence if they wanted to. Moreover, the sailor’s description of the naivety and innocent generosity of these gentle creatures implicitly likens them to children. Portrayed as running naked through the villages announcing the arrival of the Europeans with loud cries of ‘Come! Come! See the people from the sky!’, the childlike nature of these innocents necessitated the protection of their colonial conquerors, providing a justifying narrative for European imperialism. But from whom precisely did these gentle souls require the colonisers’ protection? Inaugurating the European propensity for dividing indigenous Americans into good Indians and bad ones and presaging the constructed significance of the Red/Black Carib divide, Columbus contrasted the gentleness of these Amerindians with the savagery of those referred to as ‘Carib’. The first reference to these Caribs is brief and comes towards the conclusion of his letter; he reports that he has ‘so far found no human monstrosities, as many expected … no monsters, nor report of any, except of an island which is Carib … which is inhabited by a people who are regarded in all the islands as very ferocious, [and] who eat human flesh’.67 These few lines generated the legendary and longstanding association of Carib indigenes with cannibalism

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and savagery, a damning reputation that the Red Caribs ultimately escaped and that the Black ones acquired. Therefore, in pitting the good Red Caribs against the bad Black ones, the British simply revised an age-old script to fit the political realities of the time and place. Recalling Columbus’s innocent Indians who require the colonisers’ protection, the lack of differentiation between the adults and the children in Family of Charaibs, both nearly naked ‘as their mothers bore them’, constructs a narrative of the limited progress of Red Carib society as well as the child-like nature of its people. Brunias visually suggests the stunted maturity of the Red Caribs through the pairing of the woman who stoops, a bowl between her hands, as she prepares food and the child in front of her who squats while eating from a bowl between his knees. The point is reiterated by the visual echo between the child who suckles at the breast of the seated woman and the man to the pair’s left who chugs from a bulbous calabash, the mammary shape of the primitive vessel and its nipple-like spout recalling the breast itself. The  identifications between child and adult imply a sort of innocence among the island’s ‘true’ Indians that marks them as the ‘good’ ones in this scenario, but also reinforces their incompatibility with modernity and progress. Scholars continue to debate the origins and substance of the trope of the Noble Savage; however, as Brunias’s paintings showcase, there can be little question regarding which group Britons perceived as the nobler savages in British colonial St Vincent. The concept, known by the somewhat less oxymoronic term bon sauvage in French (and the equivalent in other European languages), has roots dating to at least the sixteenth century and found even greater expression in eighteenth-century Romanticism and Sentimentalism through which the simple lifestyles and primitive innocence of indigenous Americans were idealised.68 Anti-colonialists frequently mobilised the trope of the bon sauvage to underscore Native American innocence in the face of European perfidy. For example, Spanish encomiendo-turned-missionary Bartolomé de las Casas famously exposed what came to be known as the ‘Black Legend’, the term used to describe the inhuman atrocities committed by the Spanish against the Amerindians. Contrasting themselves with the morally ‘black’ Spaniards, the British typically assumed an ‘anti-conquest’ posture that cast them as the more enlightened and righteous players in the imperial game – the kinder, gentler colonisers.69 In the case of colonial St Vincent, they took this same stance in relation to the Black Caribs, who were cast as the brutal savages in contrast to the noble Red Carib ones. Much like las Casas, in his epic work Histoire generale des Antilles habitées par les Française (four volumes, 1667–71), the French botanist and Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste du Terte mobilised the idea of the bon sauvage to underscore the child-like innocence of the Indians and the evils of colonialism. ‘Couple Caraïbe des Antilles’ (fig. 12), an engraving by Sébastien



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

Sébastien Le Clerc, ‘Couple Caraïbe des Antilles’, from Jean-Baptiste du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles habitées par les François. Divisée en deux tomes, et enrichie de cartes & de figures, Tome I [–IV] (Paris: Chez Thomas Iolly, au palais, en la salle des merciers, à la palme, & aux armes d’Hollande, 1667)

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Le Clerc used to illustrate du Terte’s text, demonstrates the prelapsarian purity associated with the bon sauvage. The previously quoted excerpt from Columbus’s letter which mentions the Amerindians’ unabashed nakedness clearly resonates with allusions to their being untouched by original sin, and his mention of the women who covered their nether regions with a simple leaf conjures images of Eve and the conventional fig leaf covering that she dons in European painting.70 Le Clerc’s image reiterates this association of the bon sauvage with humankind before the Fall, depicting a Caribbean Indian Adam and Eve (complete with the modesty leaf de rigueur in Western depictions of Eve) under a proverbial tree of life teeming with large tropical fruits (and, of course, no tools of cultivation in sight). Images like le Clerc’s seem more apt for extolling the virtues of the bon sauvage than expounding upon the benefits of colonialism. However, in the case of the Lesser Antilles, the Black Caribs, rather than the colonists, were constructed as the villains responsible for the ‘real’ Indians’ ultimate downfall, and the image of the bon sauvage rendered by Brunias’s brush reiterated the Red Caribs’ innocence and their inevitable demise in which the British – also innocent – had no culpability. Brunias’s renderings of primitive Red Caribs echo the identification of indigenous Caribbeans with prelapsarian innocence evident in the le Clerc image, while reinforcing the notion of the Red Indians as inherently anti-modern figures whose lifestyles were incompatible with the increasingly modern world represented by British colonial St Vincent. Painting in red and black: Brunias’s Carib pictures as reification of the Red/Black divide

The idea of the Noble Savage was certainly a dominant trope used to represent Indians in eighteenth-century European culture, but Europeans – and the Britsh in particular – had, through their longstanding trade and political dealings (war, alliance, etc.), the direct knowledge and understanding of Native American culture necessary to devise other modes of representation for imaging the indigenous peoples of the Americas.71 Stephanie Pratt insightfully observes that ‘Eighteenth-century images of American Indians … were also capable of representing Indians as participants in contemporary history’ and that ‘Alongside “generic” Indians occupying the predetermined space outlined by the noble savage concept, we can also find specific encounters with named individuals.’72 In understanding the work of Brunias, who painted Caribs in both of these modes, the viewer must ask how and to what end the artist employs each. Brunias’s images of Red Caribs – ethnographically informed, timeless scenes documenting their primitive culture – closely conform to the script established by Young, who seems to have regarded them as noble savages



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

who, soon to be taken care of by the Black Caribs, constituted no real threat to colonial progress. The painter’s narrow motivation here results in a body of work that demonstrates a certain uniformity, each painting differing little from the last in either style or content. In contrast, though extant holdings suggest that Brunias made far fewer pictures exclusively or even primarily depicting Black Caribs, his depictions of them are both more varied and more complicated. While all of the artist’s Red Caribs are bland, anonymous good Indians, Brunias painted both anonymous Black Caribs and the notable personage of Chatoyer with nuance and a certain immediacy, a rootedness in the contemporary moment as opposed to the ancient past that is absent from his Red Carib works. Brunias’s pictures of anonymous Black Caribs, though superficially similar to his Red Carib images in some respects, reveal subtle variations that effectively communicate very different sympathies. Meanwhile, the images reputedly of Chatoyer, more history paintings than genre pieces or ethnographic scenes and undoubtedly his most widely known Black Carib works, speak directly to the contentious history of British colonial St Vincent in which Brunias worked. Brunias paints a picture of Black Carib society that visually distinguishes the group from Red indigenes, reifying in visual terms the notion of difference that British colonialists so adamantly declared but consistently struggled to cogently articulate. However, as will be addressed in a moment, the artist’s signification of this difference arguably departed somewhat from the colonialist party line as represented by Young’s Account of the Black Charaibs. Caribbeans on a Path (fig. 13) provides a useful example of some of the distinctions between Brunias’s depictions of anonymous Black Caribs and his images of Red ones. The work features three adult Black Caribs, one male and two females, one with a baby slung in a fabric carrier across her front. The group stops in the middle of a cleared path against a backdrop of an uncultivated tropical landscape. In contrast to their Red counterparts who the artist shows carving out arguably domestic spaces from the wilds of St Vincent, these Black Caribs have no humble homestead, not even an outdoor hearth to call their own; indeed, no surviving Brunias work that I have identified depicts a Black Carib dwelling. Instead, the artist generally pictures them, as in this painting, in perpetual transit, trekking to some unspecified destination or, as in A Linen Market with a Linen-stall and Vegetable Seller in the West Indies (fig. 14), encroaching upon British settlements, lurking in the margins of market scenes. Both modes of depiction suggest that they have no legitimate place on the island.73 Similarly, while Brunias presents Red Carib families in carefully balanced compositions that underscore the harmonious nature of these primitive domestic scenes, Caribbeans on a Path communicates none of that balanced

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13

Agostino Brunias, Caribbeans on a Path (Les Caraïbes noirs de Saint-Vincent), n.d.

harmony. In contrast to the Red Caribs’ blank emotionless faces which render them more ethnographic specimens than people, the standing man and woman are clearly having an interaction and, judging from his eyes and the way that he gestures as if ticking off points on his left hand, perhaps an



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

69

­­ altercation. The work conveys a sense of discord rather than harmony as Brunias replaces the meticulous balance of Family of Charaibs with a completely off-kilter arrangement; two figures stand upright on the right side of the work as a third woman kneels on the left. The lack of balance in the composition is echoed metaphorically in the fallen pegal that the kneeling woman appears to be repacking. The fallen pegal, such a quintessentially Carib item, holds additional significance as an indication of the phony Carib-ness of the Black Caribs, for ‘real’ Indians would never drop their carefully balanced loads.74 Brunias’s images of Black Caribs do not focus on depicting them with any of the traditional elements associated with indigenous Antillean lifestyles, and thus do not demonstrate the same painstaking documentary quality as the works meant to highlight Red Carib indigenous authenticity. As previously noted, for example, Brunias never depicts the Black Caribs in tranquil tableaux attending to home and hearth near their mouinas or tabouis, nor does he show the women bent over chamacou or mattoutou to prepare family meals. Moreover, where Brunias’s attention to detail in Red Carib paintings emphasises the authentic Carib-ness of the group, in the Black Carib works it achieves the opposite effect, demonstrating that the Black Caribs are merely poor imitators of their Red models. For example, like Red Carib females, the

Agostino Brunias, A Linen Market with a Linen-stall and Vegetable Seller in the West Indies, c. 1780, oil on canvas

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Black Carib women go bare-breasted and wear aprons to cover their lower regions. However, their plain aprons, simple lengths of fabric, have none of the elaborate featherwork embellishment associated with traditional Indian garb, and though they wear jewellery, it does not resemble the adornments worn by Amerindian women in Brunias’s Red Carib pictures. Like the style of their jewellery, their close-cropped tight curls, the head-tie worn by one of them as well as the man, and the women’s thick, stocky bodies and bulbous breasts, which – unlike the bodies of the Red Carib women – conform in no way to Western ideals of feminine beauty, at once underscore their ancestral association to Africa and undercut their claim to Carib affiliation.75 In toto, these details amount to evidence of the contrived rather than credible claim to Carib identity ascribed to Black Caribs by colonialists such as Young. Brunias paints a picture of Black Carib society that unequivocally distinguishes it from the Red Carib world. Suggesting the Black Caribs as poor imitators of the true Red indigenes, his images confirm their role as illegitimate usurpers with no rightful place in the colonial world of St Vincent. However, Brunias does not necessarily strictly follow the characterisation of the Black Caribs suggested by the Young narrative. While his dark-skinned Black Carib bodies, which frequently sport the headwraps associated with both Africa and enslaved status, support the Africanised Black Carib identity upon which colonialists like Young insisted, Brunias does not depict them in the same way as exclusively African, nor does he paint them as the merciless savages that Young describes. ‘That vicious, brutal, and degenerate breed of mongrels’: British anxiety and Brunias’s Black Carib pictures as testaments to colonial hybridity

In contrast to the thoroughly African identity attributed to the Black Caribs by colonialists such as Young, Brunias presents a more complicated and nuanced picture of Black Carib identity. Primary among the artist’s deviations from the established colonialist view of the Black Caribs is his emphasis on their hybridity rather than unadulterated African-ness. Here, the artist attends to a crucial element of Carib society that obviously disconcerted British settlers but received only indirect or inchoate, if any, expression in their accounts. As previously discussed, Brunias’s Red Carib works construct an indigenous purity that simply could not have been a representation of reality in late eighteenth-century St Vincent, where Caribs had been interacting with both Europeans and Africans for almost three centuries. By 1765 the entire Carib population was effectively culturally hybrid and multiracial, or ‘tawney and mixed’ to quote Young’s text. 76 Brunias’s paintings’ insistence on the ethnic integrity of the Red Caribs implies the great stakes associated with



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

any British acknowledgement of racial and cultural hybridity as a defining feature of colonial life. Hulme notes the resolute silence regarding what he calls ‘Carib transculturation’ in British sources, and I contend that Britons’ conspicuous reticence to acknowledge this hybridity suggests something of the anxiety that it prompted.77 The British insistence on the unmitigated blackness of the Black Caribs allowed them to avoid acknowledging the fundamental and inescapable mixedness – one not subject to British containment or control  – that distinguished the Caribs. It also allowed them to avoid the reality that such intermingling presaged the inevitable colliding of worlds and the murky boundaries of identity in colonial space, a truth with implications not only for Caribbeans of colour but for white West Indian residents as well. However, Brunias’s paintings resist the insistent African identity that colonialists created for the Black Caribs, portraying them instead as distinctly hybrid figures who point to the instability of racial identification in the colonial world. An understanding of the foundation of late eighteenth-century British colonial anxieties regarding race and colour – two terms which, as previously discussed, were becoming increasingly synonymous in the last quarter of the eighteenth century – is prerequisite to appreciating the significance of this feature of Brunias’s Black Carib works. The writings of Edward Long, the staunchly pro-slavery son of a Jamaican planter, provide a context for understanding these anxieties. Colonial commentators struggled to reconcile the firmly entrenched belief, inherited from Buffon and others, that non-essential factors such as nourishment, custom, and especially climate dictated skin colour and other physical attributes with the various implications of British imperial ambition including increased social intercourse – and particularly sexual intercourse – among people of different colours and backgrounds. Long addressed both issues in his widely read book The History of Jamaica (1774), which describes at great length the island’s land and its people. In the section on Jamaica’s inhabitants, the author initially divides the latter into four primary groups: ‘Creoles, or natives; Whites, Blacks, Indians, and their varieties; Europeans and other Whites; and imported or African Blacks’.78 This bizarre organising scheme with its multiple points of convergence and separation regarding country and colour signals the dual importance of both origin and complexion to Long’s thinking and the conflicts he attempts to reconcile in his text. Long begins his description of the inhabitants with an assessment of white Creole men, giving a physical description that compares and contrasts them with their Britain-born counterparts, noting, for example, their deeper-set eyes and asserting that ‘Although descended from British ancestors, they are stamped with these characteristic deviations.’79 Following the prevailing understanding of the time, he attributes these ‘deviations’ to climate, arguing

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that were an Englishman and his wife to move to China, their descendants would probably, over the course of a few generations, ‘acquire somewhat of the Chinese cast of countenance and person’.80 However, in a defence of Britons’ essential whiteness, Long simultaneously maintains that climate’s potential to produce physical changes such as these, while powerful, is not absolute, noting that he did ‘not indeed suppose, that, by living in Guiney, they [white people] would exchange hair for wool, or a white cuticle for a black: change of complexion must be referred to some other cause’.81 Furthermore, in a more direct and vigorous defence of the whiteness of West Indian Creole Britons, Long observes: Many of the good folks in England have entertained the strange opinion, that the children born in Jamaica of white parents turn swarthy, through the effect of the climate; nay some have not scrupled to suppose, that they are converted into black-a-moors. The truth is, that the children born in England have not, in general, lovelier or more transparent skins, than the offspring of white parents in Jamaica.82

Revealing one of the other potential threats to white identity in the Caribbean, Long continues his defence of the unproblematic heritability of whiteness among Creole West Indians by asserting that undisclosed miscegenation, not climate, accounts for misconceptions about Creole whites: The many Mulatto, Quateron, and other illegitimate children sent over to England for education, have probably given rise to the opinion beforementioned; for, as these children are often sent to the most expensive public schools, where the history of their birth and parentage is entirely unknown, they pass under the general name of West Indians; and the bronze of their complexion is ignorantly ascribed to the fervour of the sun in the torrid zone.83

Long’s contention here underscores the critical importance of establishing sharp and recognisable distinctions and knowing who’s who in the colonial world. Accordingly, he denounces interracial sex and the progeny thereof as a threat to colonial order, admonishing, ‘Let any man turn his eyes to the Spanish American dominions, and behold what vicious, brutal, and degenerate breed of mongrels has been there produced, between Spaniards, Blacks, Indians, and their mixed progeny.’ Long continues, denouncing the ‘disorderly connexions’ between white men and women of colour and the consequent ‘spurious offspring of different complexions’ that threaten colonial society.84 The anxiety evident in Long’s text would not have been particular to him or to colonial Jamaica. The ‘spurious’ issue resulting from so-called ‘disorderly connexions’ rendered social identity unstable. This was particularly so in an upstart colonial environment that lacked the institutions traditionally



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used to exclude the social riff-raff, and in which everyone did not necessarily know everyone else; a world where newcomers were actively solicited and where one might walk off a boat – or, perhaps, out of the brush – and presumably create a new self. As Hulme observes: The quantity of crossings over the years already meant it was difficult to tell who people were by looking at them … An acculturated Carib, living as a farmer, wearing European dress and speaking French, might be indistinguishable, in English eyes, from a free colored; yet at the drop of a hat and with an application of body paint, he could be transformed into a Carib warrior. Just when it became absolutely crucial for the British to be able to recognise friends and enemies [due to increasing tensions between the British and the Caribs and the British and the French], the complexity of the social and racial mix on the island was becoming disconcerting. Rarely can some form of classification seemed more desirable or necessary.85

Before the last few decades of the eighteenth century when ideas of human difference and the conception of race became associated more concretely with the physical body itself, the mutability of colour through climate was a less threatening proposition. The rise of colour as a primary signifier of race necessitated a vigorous defence of Creole whiteness such as that offered by Long, and tracts such as Long’s and Young’s Account of the Black Charaibs suggest an anxious preoccupation with fixing the boundaries of white identity at this pivotal moment.86 However, where Long concentrates on establishing the immutability of whiteness, Young’s Account tackles the race question from the other side. If Africans remained Africans no matter what, it followed that the whiteness of British settlers and Creoles – so long as it remained unadulterated – could not be challenged based upon their colonial location. Young’s insistent Africanisation of the Black Caribs constructed a racial scheme in which African heritage trumped all others, adhering to the ‘one drop rule’ operative in the British colonies (in contrast to the more fluid racial systems that were the rule in the French and Spanish colonial Americas), and which had the collateral effect of limiting the possibilities of acknowledging mixed-racial ancestry. Importantly, given his Italian background and Catholic heritage, in which understandings and alignments of race, colour, and status were typically more flexible, these notions of race and ideas about whiteness are not necessarily ones that Brunias would have shared. Brunias’s West Indian Man of Color, Directing Two Carib Women with a Child (fig. 15) illustrates the artist’s depiction of the sort of hybridity colonialist accounts either failed to acknowledge or anxiously struggled to reconcile. Indeed, the painting’s recently assigned title underscores the ambiguity inherent in the work; the generic label applied to the male figure, simply ‘West Indian Man of Color’, does not identify him as Carib, mulatto, African, or

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Agostino Brunias, West Indian Man of Color, Directing Two Carib Women with a Child, c. 1780, oil on canvas

Afro-Creole – only as not white. Moreover, despite the use of two different racialising terms for the male figure and the women and child (i.e. ‘West Indian of Color’ and ‘Carib’), Brunias does not make this distinction visually through colour, rendering each of the four figures in generally the same shade of warm, rich brown with reddish and deep golden undertones. The figures are, however, distinguished significantly by their dress. While the image at least implies the women’s Carib affiliation (whether genetic or



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cultural) through their dress and their pegals and signifies their African-ness through their deep skin tone and non-Indian aprons, the man who directs them is markedly ‘un-Indian’ in his attire and, except for his complexion and his headwrap, not particularly African either. Clearly not dressed in the attire designated as the uniform of male savages in the British colonial i­­ magination – i.e. loincloth and little else – the man is also not dressed in the traditional mode  of Brunias’s enslaved men, who generally wear tattered clothing, and certainly not as a planter.87 Outfitted from head-to-ankle (he is curiously barefoot),88 he wears a distinctly hodgepodge costume of bright white consisting of a blouse-y long-sleeved shirt and baggy full-length trousers. A thoroughly hybrid assemblage of headgear caps off the ensemble in the form of a black, Western-style hat, embellished with two modest feathers, that is perched atop a red ­kerchief.89 The comprehensive effect is somewhat, but not fully, Western in style. In other words, the hybrid figure – an exceptional depiction of an Indian in Brunias’s oeuvre – is at once Carib, African, Western, and none of these things; the viewer cannot definitively place him in any of the prescriptively discrete socio-cultural worlds of colonial St Vincent.90 Referring to similar sartorial displays that mixed African and Western elements, Steeve O. Buckridge describes such hybrid fashion as ‘subversive by nature’ and finds it ‘fundamentally radical because it defied easy categorization. In essence it visually and symbolically challenged the colonial regime’s apparent deep-seated desire to divide the colonial world into clear-cut’ racial categories.91 Rather than firmly assigning the figures to fixed, predictable groups, this work suggests fluidity, ambiguity, and ultimately, the threat of disorder – represented specifically by this dark-skinned man of indefinite origin, role, or rank who acts as a driver, forcefully urging on his female charges. However, Brunias undercuts the threat of the figure’s racial ambiguity by rendering his identity liminal or difficult to read in another respect, specifically with regard to gender. Through the peculiar juxtaposition of particular details, Brunias creates a figure who at once embodies and pre-emptively exorcises the threat of disruption to the colonial order that the Black Caribs signified in the British colonial imagination. While his clothes mark his liminality and indefinite social location, the figure’s ambiguous gender identity diffuses the threat to the established order posed by his cultural and social ambiguity. Given the confusing cues about the man’s own ethnic and social identity communicated by his dress, the precise relationship between this figure and the three others is also uncertain; however, the painting conveys none of the domestic sense of the Red Carib pictures of mothers and their babies or of families making their homes in the tropical wilderness. In contrast, the man clearly maintains a position of authority over the women that is untempered by the implication of familial relationship. In addition to his erect posture

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which contrasts so sharply with the women’s bent, burden-laden backs, his dress and his accessories convey this status. The brilliant white of his outfit is punctuated by accents of the same pinkish-red worn by the women; however, while these pops of colour comprise the women’s only and essential garments, for the male driver they are superfluous accoutrements – a sash draped diagonally from shoulder to hip and the kerchief fashioned to produce some added height beneath his hat.92 The figure’s interest in such ornamental details contributes to his vexingly unstable identity but also mutes its potential threat, in much the same way that West’s Indians from Penn’s Treaty with the Indians who would have been perceived as threatening if depicted ogling a hatchet or rifle, lose all of their potentially menacing qualities as a result of their apparent willingness to trade their lands for a bolt of cloth and some ‘gaudy trinkets’.93 The portrait of John Gabriel Stedman (fig. 16) that served as the frontispiece for the immensely popular 1796 narrative of his life in Surinam between 1772 and 1777 provides an illustrative counterpoint to the oddly dressed, brownskinned man in the Brunias work.94 The two images share a number of features; however, the differences between them support Stedman’s persona as the epitome of white masculine colonial power while rendering the social identity of the anonymous man in Brunias’s painting all the more confusing.95 Both figures stand barefoot in loose white trousers; however, Stedman’s trousers fit closely around the top and he stands with his legs apart. Both the line of his trousers and his stance highlight the telltale bulge at his crotch that, along with the unequivocally phallic pistol strategically placed beside it, emphasise his masculine potency. In contrast to both Stedman and the figures of Chatoyer and his fellows in their skimpy loincloths that leave little to the imagination, the drapey folds around the dark man’s trousers in Brunias’s painting preclude this kind of masculine display. In fact, the folds create an almost labial shape at the groin, and the silhouette of the fabric around his tight stance, with legs that do not visibly separate until the knee, creates a skirt-like effect. In addition to the aforementioned pistol, Stedman’s other weapons announce his power. He is pictured with an upturned musket upon which he nonchalantly rests his bent elbow and a sword slung at his hip behind him, its point suggestively aimed at the crotch of the dead black man at his feet and echoing his pointed finger, as if to say ‘Look what I did!’ In contrast, the figure from West Indian Man of Color is not so generously endowed; he holds the hilt of an object in his hand that may be a sword, but what would ostensibly be its blade is hidden behind the fluid folds of his trousers, rendering it a feeble symbol of authority or power. Similarly, while Stedman points to the black corpse at his feet, tracing a seamless trajectory of power from his own body, through his finger, to the effect of its exercise, the anonymous man points to nothing tangible, his authority contained by the bounds of the ­­painting’s frame to which his own impotent finger is extended.



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

Francesco Bartolozzi (for John Gabriel Stedman), “From different Parents, different Climes we came,/ At different Periods”; Fate still rules the same./ Unhappy Youth while bleeding on the ground;/ ’Twas Yours to fall-but Mine to feel the wound, 1796

A close look at ‘his’ pretty face distinguishes it as quite beautiful rather than handsome; indeed, it is suspiciously feminine, with soft features, a rosy complexion, full pink lips (their colour underscored by his pinkish-red accessories), and, most notably, lovely almond-shaped eyes shaded by long, flirty lashes that are carefully rendered in thin, tiny, sweeping strokes at the corner of the eye. These are features with which Brunias sometimes painted black and mixed-race women but not men, and there can be little doubt but that the figure’s head by itself would be perceived as female. Augmenting the femininity of the figure’s features, his stark white loose trousers and blouse more

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closely recall, both in colour and silhouette, the white petticoats and blouses of the elaborately layered ensembles of Brunias’s mulatresses than the dress of his male figures of any race or class. Similarly, the feather-embellished hat, perched foppishly askew atop the rose-red headwrap, replicates a style worn frequently by mixed-race women in Brunias’s works, but not by men. Indeed, despite his position of authority relative to his female Carib charges and their obviously female anatomy, this figure appears markedly more feminine than they. The laboured expressions they evince as they carry their heavy packs indicate their physical strength and contrast markedly with the soft expression worn by their ‘boss’, whose only physical activity is to point the way, his finger extending from a daintily turned wrist. Although these feminising features highlight the instability of identity and, more significantly, the inability of the viewer to easily read the body for identity in the Caribbean colonial world, in this particular image they also work cumulatively to deflect the challenge that the figure’s ill-defined ethnic and class affiliation might suggest. Brunias’s curiously gendered, ambiguously raced driver is not an exceptional figure in his oeuvre, nor is he completely anomalous within the context of colonial West Indian visual production. For example, close inspection of the male figure from Caribbeans on a Path reveals, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent, similarly feminised features; his long, lithe body, flirty feline eyes, delicate jawline, dangling earring, and the headscarf that cascades from the back of his head in place of flowing tresses contrast sharply with the less refined appearance of the stocky women with their caps of close-cropped kinky curls. Moreover, the work’s recently assigned title which designates the figures as ethnically generic ‘Caribbeans’ reflects the difficulty of reading the figures visually as a means of assigning race. A later example from Isaac Mendes Belisario, the Jamaican artist of Sephardic Jewish extraction, brings the subtly subversive element of Brunias’s race- and gender-bending figures into vivid relief. Belisario’s ‘Koo, Koo, or Actor-Boy’ (fig. 17) represents a figure from Jamaica’s Jonkonnu celebrations, elaborate festivities which, of an intensely hybrid nature themselves, incorporated components from a number of African cultures as well as European traditions such as mumming. The Jonkonnu revels included elements of parade and masquerade in which the parodying of white culture and manners by Afro-Jamaicans took on an arguably subversive character. Koo Koo’s elaborate assemblage of clothing and accessories makes explicit the potential instability of colonial identity that Brunias’s bi-gendered ‘West Indian man’ expresses more subtly. Though unquestionably a male figure, both by tradition and the artist’s designation of him as an ‘Actor-Boy’, the figure wears an elaborate dress composed of a three-tiered, frilly pink skirt over a blue petticoat embellished with vibrantly coloured embroidery. Atop the richly detailed bodice is a ruffled coat with rose trim and decorated sleeves. Large, fluffy



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

Isaac Mendes Belisario, ‘Koo, Koo, or Actor-Boy’, plate 5, from Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica, 1837, lithograph with watercolour

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plumes – an over-the-top version of the complicated combination of featherbedecked headgear worn by Brunias’s figure – accent his dramatic headdress which is as tall as his skirts are long. Koo Koo’s doubly raced face – white mask raised to reveal black skin – as well as his double wig of long curled tresses in both auburn and black and the juxtaposition of his delicate fan with its floral design against his whip-like riding crop also transgress unequivocally defined borders of race and gender. Ultimately, the thoroughly hybrid figure Belisario creates in Koo Koo underscores the potential failure of the body as a reliable text for reading identity and powerfully symbolises the potential disruption of colonial relations of power. Reflecting the artist’s mission of ‘representing the People of different color in some of the Islands in the West Indies’, Agostino Brunias’s paintings of socalled Red and Black Caribs, like his other pictures of Caribbeans of colour, ostensibly constitute a visual supplement to the burgeoning lexicon of racial classification that emerged during the eighteenth century.96 Created during a historical moment in which the physical body, and skin colour in particular, was increasingly regarded as the primary locus of ‘race’, Brunias’s works supposedly functioned as field guides to racial identification in the colonial West Indies, texts that provided the cues to establishing exactly who was who. Ironically, the artist’s work, especially viewed through twenty-first-century eyes, produces the opposite effect, demonstrating just how ambiguous the boundaries of these racial and social identities could be. In the Carib case, Brunias’s paintings visually reified a distinction that European colonists themselves could not coherently define, putting into paint the relatively arbitrary division between Red and Black that they struggled to put into words, and making appear real what, in fact, was largely a colonialist fiction. Brunias’s ethnographic-style images of Red Carib indigenes conformed to stereotypical representations of Indians, emphasising their tawny skin, long black hair, and fondness for feather embellishments. The artist extrapolated from the colonialist script to construct a narrative of untouched, authentic Amerindian purity that was completely anachronous to the actual state of affairs in contemporary colonial St Vincent, but rendering the Indians as relics from a bygone era reinforced colonial presuppositions about their imminent and inevitable demise. By portraying the Black Caribs, instigators of this ostensible demise, as thoroughly African as opposed to Indian, the race-ing of the Carib divide also transformed their brown bodies from sovereign ones with rights that the colonial regime was bound to respect to subordinate ones that the British were entitled to control. This, in conjunction with repeated references to the slave destiny for which their ancestors were originally slated, cast the Black Caribs in the role of rebelling slaves who needed to be brought to submission by any means necessary – including, ultimately, ­­ expulsion from their homeland.



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

Moreover, and even more significantly, within the context of changing trends that put greater pressure on West Indian colonials to substantiate their own white identities and to establish a perception of the islands as a place in which British standards of social order prevailed, the terms through which the fiction of Carib difference was articulated and mobilised, and which Brunias’s paintings visually supported, had the collateral effect of shoring up racial boundaries. If, as the hackneyed adage asserts, seeing is believing, Brunias’s paintings created a visual distinction between Red and Black Caribs that allowed British colonials to see, at least superficially, the difference that they had invented, and thus believe that their fiction represented reality. However, Brunias’s images also subtly deviated from the plantocratic party line regarding the Black Caribs in significant ways. Rather than faithfully following the insistently and exclusively African identity fabricated for the Black Caribs in colonialist texts such as Young’s Account, Brunias dramatically underscored their fundamental hybridity, calling attention to the transgression of borders that colonial Britons preferred to think of as impenetrable, and revealing the body as an unreliable text for reading racial and social identity in this New World.

Notes 1 See, for example, I. E. Kirby and C. I. Martin, The Rise and Fall of the Black Caribs (Kingstown: St Vincent & the Grenadines National Trust, 1997). The cover of this  booklet features a modern-day reworking of Brunias’s image of Chatoyer and his wives designed to mimic a hand-coloured ink drawing. The note on the opening page simply reads ‘Cover Illustration: “Chatoyer and His Wives”’ with no attribution to Brunias or acknowledgement of the original image. There can be no question about the recuperative project undertaken in the text; rather than providing a date for the publication, the opening page dedicates the work to Dr I. E. Kirby ‘on the 200th Anniversary of the Gari Funa Peoples exile from St. Vincent and the Grenadines to Belize’, a seminal moment in Black Carib history. 2 As this chapter will illuminate, whether there existed a community of individuals who could accurately be described as ‘Black Caribs’ before the eighteenth century is a matter of some debate. However, no matter what one’s opinion is on the Carib question in the eighteenth century, there can be no doubt but that ‘Black Carib’ is an identity embraced by many Central American and Caribbean people today. 3 Bryan Edwards’s History, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies was originally published in 1793. The 1794 edition contained one Brunias engraving of a family of ‘Red’ Caribs. Four engravings after Brunias were incorporated into Edwards’s book in the 1801 volume. The figure in this work has been identified as Chatoyer since at least as early as 1801 when it appeared in the Edwards book; however, especially as liberties were taken with the titles of Brunias illustrations in the book (see, for example, note 7 below), it is impossible to know

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whether Brunias himself identified the man as Chatoyer or whether the figure originally represented an unnamed Carib. In any case, within decades of its creation, the figure was clearly understood to represent Chatoyer, and this identification, from which the image derives it cultural power, has persisted for over two centuries. Bryan Edwards, The history, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies, 3 volumes (London: J. Stockdale, 2nd edn, 1794–1801); all references to Edwards are from this edition unless otherwise noted. 4 Brunias paintings often feature Carib women, both ‘Red’ and ‘Black’, toting this quintessentially Carib backpack carrier. The weight of the carrier is supported and balanced by a strap fixed across the forehead. 5 William Young observed the processions of Carib women, presumably Red and Black, ‘who, laden like beasts of burden, were driven with the flat of the broad sword from the Charaib boundary, fifteen miles, to the English market’, and remarked that ‘No slavery is equally wretched with that of the Charaib women.’ See Sir William Young, 1st Bart (with Sir William Young, 2nd Bart, ed.), An Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of St. Vincent’s, with the Charaib Treaty of 1773, and other Original Documents Compiled from the Papers of the Late Sir William Young (London: J. Sewell, Knight and Triphook, 1795), p. 106. Bryan Edwards expressed a similar view regarding the treatment of Carib women, proclaiming, ‘I am sorry to add, that the condition of these poor creatures was at the same time truly wretched … the females were treated rather as slaves than as companions. They sustained every species of drudgery…’; see Edwards, The history, civil and commercial, vol. 1, p. 40. 6 An engraved version of this work appeared in Edwards’s book as Pacification with the Maroon Negroes and has generally been understood to represent the British peace with Jamaican maroons. For more information, see Michael Craton, ‘The Black Caribs of St. Vincent: A Reevaluation’, in Robert Engerman (ed.), The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996), p. 81. However, given the similarity of the figures to Brunias’s other male Black Caribs and the fact that Brunias was in St Vincent with Young during the initial period of tension with the Black Caribs, the consensus among current scholars (including, for example, Honychurch, Hulme, Craton, and myself) holds that the work almost certainly represents the treaty that concluded the First Carib War. 7 Quoted in Young, Account of the Black Charaibs, p. 90. 8 In a journal entry dated 13 January 1792, Sir William Young relates a meeting with Chatoyer, his brother du Vallé, and their six sons. Young describes both of the elder Black Caribs as ‘well dressed’ and notes that that du Vallé, who owned nine negro slaves and a cotton plantation, ‘may be termed the founder of civilization among’ his people. The parties later dined together at Young’s villa. Future interactions would not be so cordial. Sir William Young, ‘A Tour through the Several Islands of Barbadoes, St. Vincent, Antigua, Tobago, and Grenada’, in Edwards, The history, civil and commercial, p. 262. 9 In her important new book, Slavery, Geography, and Empire in NineteenthCentury Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica, Charmaine A. Nelson



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

makes a similar argument about the visual distinction between black and white labouring bodies in William Clark’s Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board (1823) from his Ten Views in Antigua. While Clark depicts black workers engaged in physical tasks such as pushing the barrels into boats, he shows a white man bent over one of the barrels to inspect its label, thus emphasising both the man’s literacy and his intellectual superiority; see Nelson, Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 220–221. Nelson published this latest addition to her esteemed record of scholarship just as I was completing the final edits to my manuscript and sending it off to production. As the work constitutes such a critical contribution to studies of the visual culture of slavery, colonialism, and empire, I felt compelled to engage with it to the extent that I could; however, I regret that I did not have more time to allow the book’s insights to inform my conclusions as I am sure my own scholarship would have benefited from it. 10 West’s painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1772. Although Brunias was probably already in the Caribbean by that time, the image also circulated around Britain and the Americas through a number of engravings such that it eventually achieved ‘iconic’ status. For a thorough discussion of the painting, see Ann Uhry Abrams, ‘Benjamin West’s Documentation of Colonial History: Penn’s Treaty with the Indians’, Art Bulletin, 64.1 (1982), pp. 59–75. 11 For further discussion, see Stephanie Pratt, The American Indian in British Art, 1700–1840 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005). John Verelst’s portraits of the so-called ‘Four Indian Kings’ offer an important early example of different modes of representing high-ranking indigenes. The four kings, whose actual status vis-à-vis their particular nations is the subject of some debate, travelled to London in 1710 to represent the Iroquois confederacy in a quasi-diplomatic capacity and quickly became somewhat of a sensation. While Verelst maintained many of the conventions of ethnographic art, painting the figures in woodland backgrounds and with wild animals and artifacts that coincided with their status as exotic curiosities, he also painted them as individuals of high status, paying careful attention to face, body, and pose such that they are ‘presented in essentially the same way an English gentleman of the period would have been painted’. See Eric Hinderaker, ‘The “Four Indian Kings” and the Imaginative Construction of the First British Empire’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 53.3 (1996), p. 496. The numerous portraits of Mohawk Joseph Brant (by John Francis Rigaud, George Romney, Gilbert Stuart, and Ezra Ames, for example) also provide rich examples of alternative modes of representing Indian leaders. 12 Indeed, because the Red/Black Carib divide that Brunias’s works represent is so particular to the historical circumstances in which he painted, I have found it necessary to provide a significant amount of historical context, including not only basic facts and scholarly interpretations but an analysis of the period’s prevailing ideas about ‘race’ as well. Although providing this background takes the reader a bit further from a discussion of the paintings themselves than I would like at times, I find it prerequisite to appreciating the complex interpretation of this body of Brunias’s work that the chapter ultimately offers.

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13 Encyclopedia Britannica, online, s.v. ‘St Vincent and the Grenadines’. 14 “St. Vincent and the Grenadines – History and Culture”, iExplore, http://www. iexplore.com/articles/travel-guides/caribbean/st-vincent-and-grenadines/his​​ tory-and-culture (accessed 15 March 2016). 15 After passing into British hands in 1763, St Vincent was restored, with the help of Carib allies, to French rule in 1779; however, the renewed French title was shortlived. In 1783 the British regained the island under the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. 16 Peter Hulme, ‘Black, Yellow, and White on St. Vincent: Moreau de Jonnès’s Carib Ethnography’, in Felicity A. Nussbaum (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 184. 17 Population numbers cited in Edgar Adams, People on the Move: The Effects of Some Important Historical Events on the People of St. Vincent and The Grenadines (Kingstown: R & M Adams Book Centre, 2002), p. 6. 18 Peter Hulme’s pioneering work on the division of the Caribs into Red and Black significantly informs this chapter. Hulme’s work represents an interpretative evolution in his scholarship, from early work that takes this division for granted to his more recent publications that consider this division a colonialist construction. Supported by my own analysis of period commentary, my work proceeds from this more recent interpretation. However, I have also found the scholarship of historian Michael Craton, whose work on the Black Caribs gives more credence to the division, quite useful, particularly for understanding Carib/British/French relations. Incidentally, eighteenth-century Britons used the modifiers ‘Yellow’ and ‘Red’ interchangeably to refer to the Caribbean Indians who they did not perceive as descended from African forebears. Though ‘Yellow’ is conventionally used by scholars today, following Sir William Young, the primary source to whom I refer most frequently in this chapter, I consistently use ‘Red’ as the modifier to distinguish this group. Direct quotations, of course, retain the term preferred by the original author. Similarly, I have retained antiquated variations of the word ‘Carib’ (i.e. Charaib) in quotations and painting titles but have otherwise employed the conventional contemporary spelling. 19 Hulme, ‘Black, Yellow, and White on St. Vincent’, p. 185. 20 The first recorded reference to this shipwreck seems to have been in a deposition given by Major John Scott in 1661 which dates the event as 1635; see, for example, ‘First Reconnaissances of the Black Caribs’, in Peter Hulme and Neil L. Whitehead (eds), Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 171. 21 Edgar Adams claims, for example, that ‘runaway slaves from Barbados often made their escape by boats which took them to the eastern coast of St. Vincent’. See Adams, People on the Move, p. 6. 22 The full title of this work is An Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of St. Vincent’s, with the Charaib Treaty of 1773, and other Original Documents Compiled from the Papers of the Late Sir William Young. The work was compiled from the papers of the first Sir William Young by his son, also called Sir William Young, and published in 1795. Although the work is typically treated as the



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first-hand account by the father, I contend that the editorship of the son, which produces a seamless quality that does, indeed, make it read like an eyewitness account of the complete set of events, deserves consideration, and the perspectives offered by the text should not unproblematically be attributed to Sir William Young, First Bart. 23 Hulme, ‘Black, Yellow, and White on St. Vincent’, p. 194. 24 The establishment of the Red/Black divide worked to fix – in both senses of the word – the heretofore somewhat vexed boundary between two classes of ‘savages’, Indian and African, in the world of the British Americas. Particularly in terms of British literary and visual culture, this border had historically been rather unstable. For example, the character Yarico in the legendary tale of Inkle and Yarico, originally an Indian maiden when she first appeared in Richard Ligon’s A True & Exact History of Barbadoes (1657) and when she was popularised in the version published in the Spectator in 1711, was transformed into a ‘negro virgin’ in the poetic version published in London Magazine in 1734. See ‘Two Versions of the Story of Inkle and Yarico’, in Werner Sollors (ed.), Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New (New York: New York University Press, 2004), pp. 145–151. Roxann Wheeler has a thorough examination of the phenomenon of Amerindian characters in British literature who, as in tales of Inkle and Yarico, inexplicably become African in subsequent versions of their stories; see Wheeler, ‘Colonial Exchanges: Visualizing Racial Ideology and Labour in Britain and the West Indies’, in Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (eds), An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 36–59. 25 Hulme, ‘Black, Yellow, and White on St. Vincent’, p. 185. 26 Young, Account of the Black Charaibs, p. 5. 27 Hulme, ‘Black, Yellow, and White on St. Vincent’, p. 186. 28 Young, Account of the Black Charaibs, p. 2. Although mass Carib deportation from St Vincent did not occur until after the mid-1790s, the British considered the possibility of Carib removal – albeit voluntary rather than forcible – almost immediately upon attempting to settle the island. In August 1765, the island’s commissioners, including Sir William Young, sent a letter to the Lords Commissioner of the Treasury suggesting that the Caribs, who were ‘altogether uncivilized, and the Blacks particularly of an idle untractable disposition’, might be persuaded ‘with money, or whatever else may be acceptable’ to relocate to Bequia, an island off St Vincent’s coast (now considered part of the Grenadines); see the letter dated 10 August 1765 quoted in Young, Account of the Black Charaibs, pp. 28–29. 29 Ibid., p. 5. 30 Ibid., p. 8. 31 Letter from the Commissioners of St Vincent (T. Gregg, William Young, Robert Stuart, and Robert Wynne) to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, 10 August 1765, quoted in Young, Account of the Black Charaibs, pp. 28–29. 32 According to Young, the cargo of shipwrecked Africans who were the Black Caribs’ ancestors had been bound for slavery in the colonies. The Red Caribs had originally tried to enslave them, but the Africans, being of the ‘warlike Moco tribe’,

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rose up against them, eventually becoming their oppressors, massacring Red Carib males and taking their women as wives and concubines; see Young, Account of the Black Charaibs, pp. 6–8. 33 Ibid., p. 14; emphasis retained from original text. 34 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 35 ‘Copy of the Declaration of Joseph Chatoyér, Chief of the Charaibs’, quoted in Young, Account of the Black Charaibs, p. 118. 36 Ibid., p. 117. 37 Ibid. 38 1769 letter from the Commissioners of St Vincent to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, quoted in Young, Account of the Black Charaibs, p. 53. 39 For example, Hulme observes, ‘The planter evidence for two distinct nations or races, for how that division came about, and for how completely the Black Caribs dominated by 1795 is not without certain self-contradictions, not least that – even by the planters’ own account – the Black Caribs spoke the same language as their Yellow counterparts and had adopted the entire repertoire of their cultural practices, such as flattening infant heads and upright burials’; see Hulme, ‘Black, Yellow, and White on St. Vincent’, p. 185. 40 Ibid., p. 193. 41 Young, Account of the Black Charaibs, p. 9. 42 Young suggested that the Red Caribs numbered only about one hundred in contrast to the Black Carib population of approximately 3,000 strong; see Young, Account of the Black Charaibs, p. 18. 43 de Jonnès quoted in Hulme, ‘Black, Yellow, and White on St. Vincent’, p. 189. 44 Wheeler, Complexion of Race, p. 181. 45 Hulme, ‘Black, Yellow, and White on St. Vincent’, p. 185; emphasis retained from original. 46 Young, Account of the Black Charaibs, p. 9. 47 Young, ‘A Tour through the Several Islands of Barbadoes, St. Vincent, Antigua, Tobago, and Grenada’, pp. 275–276. 48 Hulme, ‘Black, Yellow, and White on St. Vincent’, p. 192. 49 Young, Account of the Black Charaibs, pp. 7–8. 50 Ibid., p. 15. 51 Ibid., p. 18. 52 Edwards, The history, civil and commercial, vol. 1, p. 44. Interestingly, Edwards makes no reference to the Black Caribs in this chapter, alluding to them only in this reference which singles out the Red indigenes. His chapter is clearly meant to describe the ‘original’ indigenes or Red Caribs and, interestingly, he attributes a much more pugnacious spirit to them than Young does, pitting Caribs against Arawaks rather than Red Caribs against Black. He does make mention of the Black Caribs much later in the work, giving a similar story of their origins as Young, emphasising them as ‘Negroes’ rather than Caribs, describing the ‘savage hostilities between the Negroes and the Charaibes’, and observing that, due to these hostilities, the few Red Caribs who had remained were, by the time of publication, ‘exterminated’; see Edwards, The history, civil and commercial, vol. 3, p. 400.



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

53 Kathryn S. Hight. ‘“Doomed to Perish”: George Catlin’s Depictions of the Mandan’, American Art (Summer 1990), p. 119. 54 Young, Account of the Black Charaibs, p. 11. 55 To the extent that such Red Carib enclaves existed at all in the late 1700s, the majority of British settlers would have been unlikely to encounter the indigenes in the undeveloped parts of the islands where the Indians made their homes. Moreover, the majority of Brunias’s works eventually made their way outside the Caribbean, returning to Britain with their owners where they served as mementos and colonial propaganda and where viewers were unlikely to have ever encountered a Red Carib – or any kind of Carib, for that matter – under any circumstances. 56 The multiple perspectives recall the similarly ethnographic work in Theodor de Bry’s engravings of Algonquian women, rendered after the original Jamestown watercolours of James White and widely published in the late sixteenth century. De Bry, deviating from White’s original paintings, provided both frontal and posterior views of the women. The strategy allowed for a more balanced and elegant composition while lending documentary credence to the image because the views from front and behind made the figures appear more like specimens. 57 The painting does convey some sense of distinct gender roles that roughly correspond to traditional Western notions of masculinity and femininity. For example, the women, who engage in domestic activities such as food preparation and childcare, wear skirt-like aprons as opposed to loincloths and are more highly adorned than the men, and one of the men carries a bow and arrow replete with the masculine associations accorded to weaponry. However, the relative similarity of both male and female costume – the female aprons provide scarcely more coverage than the male loincloths and both sexes go topless – as well as the burden-laden woman on the painting’s left who engages in the type of heavy lifting traditionally deemed ‘man’s work’ suggests less fixed and developed gender roles than eighteenth-century Britons would have, in accordance with four-stages theory, considered civilised, thus underscoring the Red Caribs’ ‘primitive’ stage of development. This relative lack of concrete gender differentiation is also emphasised by the mixed-sex pairs used to present the 360-degree view: female front/male back, female right/male left. 58 See, for example, the unidentifiable specks of orange meant to represent fruits or flowers that punctuate the tree in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing (fig. 35) or the often indistinguishable generic produce typically sold by bondspeople in the artist’s market scenes. 59 Honychurch, ‘Agostino Brunias’, n.p. 60 Ibid; Honychurch also acknowledges that ‘[s]uch a pristine gathering, free of European trade goods, may not have existed in the 1760s’ and that Brunias probably ‘pieced together elements’ of Carib culture in this constructed scene. According to him, other identifiable features of the work include the clay bowl of chamacou and the wicker stand, known as a mattoutou, on to which she lowers it. The calabash from which the seated man drinks is also an identifiable Carib ware known as a mouloutoucou. 61 Pratt, The American Indian in British Art, pp. 23–34.

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62 Ibid., p. 22. 63 West quoted in Pratt, The American Indian in British Art, p. 85. 64 To be fair, all Caribs in the Lesser Antilles would have had interaction with the French. However, there was at least the perception of greater ties between the ­­so-called Black Caribs and Britain’s arch-enemy in the imperial contest for the islands. 65 First published in Barcelona in 1493, the missive was later translated into Latin and circulated throughout the major capitals of Europe, enjoying nine editions within about a year of its first printing. Columbus’s chronicle provided Europeans with the first accounts of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and significantly shaped the way that Amerindians would be seen in the collective European imagination for centuries to come. For more discussion, see ‘The Letter of Columbus (1493)’, in Hulme and Whitehead (eds), Wild Majesty, p. 9. I have intentionally appended the modifier ‘so-called’ to New World here, in order to distinguish my use of the term as defined in the introduction from the more traditional, Eurocentric usage that reflects the perception of Columbus and his patrons. 66 Ibid., p. 12. 67 Ibid., pp. 14–15. 68 The general connotation of sauvage in French is simply ‘wild’, as in uncultivated or untamed (fleur sauvage for wildflower, or riz sauvage for wild rice), not necessarily ‘brutal’ as in the English ‘savage’. Ter Ellingson observes, ‘The English “noble savage” contrasts notably with bon sauvage, buen salvaje, and gut Wilde, all sharing attributions of goodness and wildness but lacking the highly charged polarities of the English term … The French bon sauvage and its cognates express a gentle irony; the English “Noble Savage” drips with sarcasm’; see Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 7–8. 69 For further discussion, see Christopher Hodgkins, Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature (Columbia, MO: Missouri University Press, 2002), pp. 54–76. 70 Admittedly, that the women feel the need to cover themselves suggests some degree of modesty that does not completely tally with the idea of prelapsarian innocence. 71 Pratt, The American Indian in British Art, p. 7. 72 Ibid. 73 Kay Dian Kriz has arrived at a similar conclusion, suggesting that Brunias’s depiction of Black Caribs on winding roads ‘invites his viewers to imagine these people as property-less nomads – precisely what Young and the Vincentian planters wanted them to become’; see Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 49. 74 Given that Brunias frequently included Carib women – Red and Black – with their pegals in his images and that descriptions of them bearing their loads in these indigenous carriers feature in nearly every textual description of the unique elements of Carib culture by Britons, the pegal clearly constituted a primary sign by which Caribs were identified in the colonial Lesser Antilles, and their improper usage in this picture can be understood as a marker of the inauthentic Indian-ness of Black Caribs.



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

75 Female leg wrappings provide another example of Brunias’s use of detail to challenge Black Carib authenticity. Although the legs of the women in Caribbeans on a Path are bare, in other paintings, like West Indian Man of Color, Directing Two Carib Women with a Child (fig. 15). Brunias represents Black Carib women with leg adornments, but these have little in common with the intricate bindings worn by so-called Red Carib women to enlarge their calves. 76 Young, Account of the Black Charaibs, p. 9. 77 Hulme, ‘Black, Yellow, and White on St. Vincent’, p. 193. 78 Edward Long, The history of Jamaica, or, General survey of the ancient and modern state of that island: with reflections on its situation, settlements, inhabitants, climate, products, commerce, laws, and government, 3 vols (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), vol. 2, p. 260. 79 Ibid., p. 262. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., p. 274. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid., pp. 327–328. 85 Hulme, ‘Black, Yellow, and White on St. Vincent’, p. 191. 86 In spite of this insistence upon their inalienable whiteness, West Indian Creole whites did not escape from Long’s analysis completely unscathed, but his negative critiques generally applied not to their physiognomy but to their manners (particularly, as will be taken up later, those of white Creole women). 87 Interestingly, however, the figure’s ensemble does resemble that of the black male figure in Brunias’s Handkerchief Dance (fig. 33) who also wears a white top and bottom accented by a red kerchief and cross-slung sash. However, the enslaved  man’s britches are knee-length, tattered, and grimy from labour. The  figure’s outfit also shares elements of the clothing worn by the mixedrace planter  from A Planter and his Wife (fig. 1), particularly the full-length white ­­trousers, fitted tight around the ankles but loosely around the crotch, and the black felt hat. 88 The African and Caribbean dress historian Steeve O. Buckridge indicates that enslaved people generally did not receive shoes as part of their clothing rations (and those who had them generally bought them themselves and reserved them for church or other special occasions). Therefore, shoelessness could, in ­­general, be understood as a sign of enslavement or at least poverty. See Steeve O. Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), p. 59. Charmaine A. Nelson also identifies shoelessness with enslaved status in depictions of Afro-Caribbeans; see Nelson, Slavery, Geography, and Empire, pp. 360 and 373. However, the ­­equation of shoelessness and slavery does not seem to fit with the figure’s relative position of power in the composition or his possession of other accessories such as the hat and sword that signify privileged status. 89 Referring to several mixed-race female figures in another Brunias painting, Steeve O. Buckridge describes the wearing of a hat atop a headwrap as ‘an interesting

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synthesis in dress customs’ that suggests an imitation of ‘the European high style of some years before’. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, p. 94. 90 Although it is possible that a viewer well-acquainted with racial and social distinctions might have been able to make sense of this figure, metropolitan British viewers certainly would not have known what to make of him. Moreover, his status as a rather exceptional figure in the painter’s body of work coupled with Brunias’s generally formulaic depiction of Black and Red Caribs supports my sense of his hybridity as a source of potential anxiety for viewers. A Linen Market with a Linen-stall and
Vegetable Seller in the West Indies (fig. 14) provides the only other example in Brunias’s work (and a far less complex one) of this sort of ‘cultural cross-dressing’, as Tobin terms it, performed by Caribs of any type. In the image, a Black Carib man stands at the margins of a marketplace, typically garbed in little more than loincloth save for the important addition of a Western-style hat bedecked with a feather and worn atop a red kerchief, and a sword upon which he leans. Ironically, this sort of hybrid attire provides a more accurate depiction of Carib dress in St Vincent after centuries of contact with Europeans than Brunias’s more typical scenes of Indians in loincloths and aprons. James Axtell and Beth Fowkes Tobin, among others, have documented the extent to which indigenous peoples in the Americas appreciated European goods and uniquely incorporated them into their own styles such that trade in such commodities became an important part of the British (and French) colonial programme, and the promise of these sorts of trinkets an important bargaining chip in securing colonial alliances. However, in contrast to images from North America, such as portraits of Joseph Brant, that emphasise the cultural melange evident in indigenous fashions of the eighteenth century and demonstrate Indian cultures as dynamic and their people as players in contemporary events, Brunias typically presents indigenous culture as permanently a thing of the past, in the case of the Red Caribs, or a false imitation of that past, in the case of the Black. See Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, chs 2 and 3, and James Axtell, ‘The First Consumer Revolution’, in Lawrence B. Glickman (ed.), Consumer Society in American History: A Reader (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 85–99. 91 Buckridge, The Language of Dress, p. 93. 92 As Buckridge notes, headwraps also served any number of practical functions including, but not limited to, absorbing perspiration, hiding or protecting injuries or scalp conditions, keeping infestations of lice at bay, protecting newly fixed ­­hairstyles, and providing cover when there had been no time to make the hair presentable. However, the ornamental manner in which this figure styles his wrap departs significantly from the far more utilitarian head ties worn by Brunias’s other male figures and more closely resembles the fancy tied fabric headdresses worn by mixed-race women in Brunias’s pictures and which Buckridge describes in relation to black and mixed-race women in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, pp. 92–94. 93 Beth Fowkes Tobin discusses West’s decision to centre his painting around the exchange of a bolt of cloth, rather than any sort of weapon which would have aroused associations with violence on the frontier, or quotidian goods such as



Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black

pots, tools, or blankets which would have humanised the Indians. The use of cloth, in addition to the contrast between the elaborately dressed Delaware and the sombrely attired Quakers, marked them as a feminised civilisation, concerned with frivolities, easily subdued, and wholly unfit to manage Pennsylvania; see Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, pp. 59–61. 94 The portrait is meant to represent Stedman during his time in the Caribbean in the 1770s, precisely the period when Brunias most likely painted the Black Carib works, rendering the comparison between these two figures even more compelling. As the engraving of Stedman was not published until the mid-1790s and Brunias died in 1796, it is unlikely that Brunias was familiar with the image; therefore, similarities between the works more probably represent general trends in colonial dress than direct copying from one image to another. 95 Marcus Wood offers a provocative reading of the Stedman frontispiece that considers its raced and gendered dynamics of power in ways that inform and support my reading of the work and its implications for the vexingly hybrid figure in Brunias’s West Indian Man of Color, Directing Two Carib Women with a Child. Wood asserts that Stedman’s ‘highly erotic’ frontispiece image ‘both sentimentalizes, sexualizes, and trans-sexualizes the body of the black victim’, particularly in juxtaposition to its depiction of Stedman; see Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 98–100. 96 Handwritten paper tag affixed to the back of all four extant paintings of the set of six donated to Harvard University in 1790 by John Gardiner and currently in the collection of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography.

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Merry and contented slaves and other island myths: representing Africans and Afro-Creoles in the Anglo-American world Young’s Account of the Black Charaibs mobilised subtle and not-so-subtle allusions to the rebellion in Haiti to construct a narrative of the Carib Wars that demonised the Black Caribs and portrayed them as rebels t­hemselves – Africans destined for slavery who refused to submit to the yoke of British authority. Ironically, Agostino Brunias, the artist who painted the black Indians for Young and who came to be known as the plantocracy’s painter, boasts a fascinating association with the supreme hero of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint L’Ouverture. This connection exists in the form of eighteen intriguing hand-painted buttons, emblazoned with Brunias’s imagery depicting Caribbeans of various colours in scenes of daily life, that are said to have adorned the coat of the historic black leader. I explore the legend of the buttons, their relationship to L’Ouverture, and their larger implications for thinking about Brunias’s oeuvre in the coda to this book. For now, however, it suffices to say that much like the endurance of Brunias’s image of Chatoyer as a symbol of West Indian resistance, the association of Brunias’s imagery with such an exemplar of black resistance as L’Ouverture indicates that, despite the artist’s connection to the colonial regime and the plantocratic elite, something in his work affirms the humanity and agency of colonial West Indians of colour. Brunias may have painted for the plantocractic class, constructing pretty pictures of Caribbean life that reflected the vision of the islands upon which white, colonialist identities depended; however, the artist’s paintings did not necessarily or entirely envision Caribbeans of colour in precisely the same way that his patrons did, even if they could still be used to serve their interests. In addition to supporting the idealised view of slavery and colonialism held by his employers, Brunias’s works such as Handkerchief Dance on the Island of Dominica (fig. 28), which receives significant attention in this chapter, also arguably accomplish an affirmation of Afro-Caribbean humanity and culture that potentially impinges upon the colonial fictions his patrons propagated. This parallel narrative might not have been easily legible to elite viewers at the time of the paintings’ creation, but they are nonetheless inherent to the



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

pictures themselves and represent – whether intentionally or not – a unique vision of colonial Caribbean life. This chapter considers Brunias’s portrayal of presumably enslaved darkskinned Africans and Afro-Creoles. The reference to ‘myths’ in the title signals both the way in which Brunias’s pictures of black Caribbeans promoted planters’ colonialist fantasies of thoroughly contented slaves who loved and respected those who enslaved them, and the misguided perception that this is the full extent of what the artist’s images do; that they are, in other words, merely uncomplicated pro-slavery propaganda. In James Pope-Hennessy’s estimation, Brunias’s images illustrated perfectly what he describes as the ‘Myth of the Merry and Contented Slave’, a plantocratic vision of ‘fictive slave  existence [in which] turbaned Negroes and Negresses sang as they worked the cane or cotton-fields by day, spent the night drinking, dancing, and making love, reared happy families of sportive piccaninnies, and liked and respected the white masters, their indolent whey-faced wives and their spoilt children’.1 Indeed, proponents of slavery and advocates of West Indian colonisation did, in fact, mobilise Brunias’s works to support their arguments.2 For instance, invoking the commonplace comparison of the situation of enslaved Africans in the Americas and the British poor, John Tobin, writing in 1785, invoked Brunias’s pictures to argue that enslaved workers had the better deal. He compared the ‘plump, active, and merry figures, with the emaciated squalid, and heart-broken inhabitants of the distant English villages’.3 In 1791 the editors of Gentlemen’s Magazine also cited Brunias’s pictures as evidence of the well-being of West Indian bondspeople, reporting, in conjunction with the publication of an anti-abolition poem, that ‘Sir William Young has a series of pictures in which the Negroes on our plantations are  justly and pleasingly exhibited in various scenes.’4 In addition to citing these sorts of examples, those who understand Brunias’s oeuvre as nothing more than plantocratic propaganda highlight the conspicuous absence from his paintings of any explicit reference to or significant gesture towards the brutal realities of slavery, particularly slave labour, as a fundamental feature of the British colonial presence in the West Indies. There is certainly merit to this line of argument; Brunias’s vibrant, colourful works invariably depict bondsfolk in scenes of leisure and merrymaking or engaged in entrepreneurial pursuits such as selling produce, and such activities do indeed elide the bitter truths of slavery and colonialism. No extant Brunias painting depicts the workings of the plantation or shows AfroCaribbeans engaged in hard labour. Even the artist’s washerwomen, who are both dark-skinned and obviously of mixed race, appear to be engaged more in a leisurely frolic in a stream than hard at work; the laundry paddles they wield read more as fashionable accessories than tools of labour. A superficial interpretation of the artist’s paintings might suggest that Brunias paints a

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categorically rosy picture of Afro-Caribbean life that did nothing more than support idealistic colonialist visions of the quality of life that black people enjoyed despite – or, indeed, because of – slavery. However, while an explicit treatment of certain dimensions of slavery is absent from Brunias’s work, an explicit concentration on the activities of black people themselves certainly is not, and this constitutes an important departure from the images of many other artists who worked for colonial interests in the West Indies that deserves critical attention. Brunias depicts dark-skinned men and women of African descent engaged in a variety of activities, sometimes in supporting roles but also as featured subjects. For example, the artist often painted African or Afro-Creole hawkers of cloth or produce, as well as darkcomplexioned servants, in large compositions depicting Sunday markets. At Sunday markets, enslaved men and women bought, traded, and sold the produce of their provision grounds, modest plots of land allotted to them for small-scale agricultural pursuits and the raising of livestock such as chickens and hogs, as well as products that they had made or purchased. It is important to recognise that such parcels were not the gifts of benevolent slave owners to the black men and women whom they considered property. On the contrary, provision grounds primarily served the interests of the planters. As Charmaine A. Nelson quite rightly observes, these were ‘marginal lands … through which their [the enslaved people’s] own labours supplemented the rations provided for enslaved families in most islands, or fed them almost entirely in others’.5 However, the surplus of provision grounds could be sold for profit in the market. As Hilary McD. Beckles observes, these markets, held on the one day of respite that enslaved people were given from plantation labour, ‘had great influence over the informal commercial sector of most island economies’.6 Moreover, they constituted an important site of agency for enslaved men and women who combined entrepreneurialism in the commercial sphere with opportunities for creating community. Profits from goods sold at market afforded enslaved men and women both necessities and small luxuries (such as the silk stockings and pocket watches that will be discussed later and that colonial commentators frequently criticised them for owning) and could even be used to purchase their freedom. Importantly, huckstering (called ‘higgling’ on some islands), especially by women, can also be understood as a continuation of the socio-economic culture of African societies, representing the maintenance of African culture in the New World.7 Other canvases depict voluptuous, dark-skinned, nude washerwomen (who, as will be discussed in the next chapter, admittedly usually play a supporting role to highlighted mixed-race female figures). Occasionally, Brunias featured presumably free black men and women in fine clothes engaged in genteel conversation, as in the stunning Free West Indian Dominicans (fig. 18), and the enigmatic A Mother with her Son and a Pony (fig. 19), which depicts



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

Agostino Brunias, Free West Indian Dominicans, c. 1770, oil on canvas

a lavishly outfitted black woman in a lovely floral gown quite unlike Brunias’s typical ensembles of solids and stripes.8 The curiously barefoot woman also boasts an impressive array of jewellery – glittering earrings, a stunning multistrand choker, two bejewelled bracelets, and a number of rings. In still other works, however, including the dancing scene that emerges as the primary focus of this chapter, the artist’s compositions showcase Africans

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19

Agostino Brunias, A Mother with her Son and a Pony, c. 1775, oil on canvas

and Afro-Creoles, most of them presumably enslaved, in a definitively black domain where they are involved in their own cultural activities. Moreover, contrasting Brunias’s images with written accounts by colonial Britons proves illuminating, suggesting the extent to which his pictures failed to perfectly parrot the plantocratic script. Colonial commentators, Sir William Young II principal among them, emphasised the extent to which enslaved black people loved and depended upon the whites who enslaved them. While Young places himself at the psychic centre of black existence, in the Afro-Caribbean world that Brunias depicts, whites are, for the most part, conspicuously absent and certainly insignificant.



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

Agostino Brunias, Servants Washing a Deer, c. 1775, oil on canvas

I do not mean to suggest here that Brunias promoted an abolitionist agenda or that his work constitutes any real political critique of slavery as an institution or of the colonial system in general. In no way was Brunias any sort of paintbrush-wielding, pro-black activist, and his images of Africans and AfroCreoles certainly did appeal to sugar-coated plantocratic visions of life on the West Indian plantation. However, unlike the work of other British colonial artists working in the Caribbean for whom black people were generally little more than living landscape features or curious spectacles for white amusement, Brunias’s paintings’ unique portrayal of people of African descent provides a privileged glimpse of the particularly African-influenced and specifically hybrid colonial culture developed in black West Indian communities.

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People of African descent were hardly popular artistic subjects in e­ ighteenth-century British art, colonial or otherwise, typically appearing – when they appeared at all – as household servants (probably enslaved) at the margins of individual or family portraits such as Johann Zoffany’s painting of Brunias’s sponsor Sir William Young and his family (fig. 21).9 During the late eighteenth century, the emergence of the abolitionist movement as a significant force in British politics rendered the black body a powerful icon in images such as the ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother’ emblem, the diagram of the slave ship Brookes, and paintings, reproduced as prints, by George Morland (1763–1804).10 However, for the most part, such works depicted ‘victimized blacks implicitly appealing for the protection of benevolent whites’, mobilising the black body as symbol rather than aiming to convey the depth of its humanity.11 With regard to colonial Caribbean artists, they inevitably counted upon the patronage of slaveholders and thus had a vested interest in avoiding the fraught question of treating fellow human beings as property that depicting slavery inevitably prompted; most avoided the issue altogether by focusing on landscapes and topographical views. This renders a discussion of Brunias’s production relative to that of his direct peers working in the Caribbean challenging, as he did not really have any. In this chapter, I evaluate Brunias’s depictions of Africans and AfroCreoles in light of the work of George Robertson (1742–88) and Isaac Mendes Belisario (1794–1849), two artists also working in the colonial West Indies

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Johann Zoffany, The Family of Sir William Young, c. 1767–69, oil on canvas



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

to whom Brunias is often compared. While there are significant differences between Brunias’s work and that of Robertson or Belisario, particularly issues of genre and historical context, that must be carefully attended to, these comparisons ultimately reveal Brunias’s unique portrayal of Afro-Caribbeans relative to those of other European-trained painters working for British colonial interests, and bring into relief the singular treatment of black life in the British West Indies that his pictures offer. Unique not only in their portrayal of Afro-West Indians themselves but in their presentation of Caribbean time and space, Brunias’s depictions of the explicitly inchoate, here-and-now Afro-Creole colonial culture developed by black Caribbeans sharply contrast with Robertson’s timeless, picturesque Caribbean Arcadias and Belisario’s modern, urban Kingston. His pictures of black West Indians are firmly rooted in their historical present, depicting a world far from both paradise and London, a world very much engaged in the messy transition from tropical wilderness to colonial outpost. After situating these images within the context of British colonial painting in the Caribbean, I discuss Brunias’s Handkerchief Dance on the Island of Dominica relative to two examples from North America, an unknown artist’s eighteenth-century watercolour known as Plantation Scene and Christian Mayr’s Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Springs.12 In comparing Brunias’s and other British colonial images of Caribbean black people to these two works, I aim to explore the possibility that, within Brunias’s idealistic dancing scenes and his pictures of black West Indians in general, are testaments to black humanity and agency even under slavery. Replete with tension, in depicting black West Indians in the context of a vibrant Afro-Creole culture of their own making, these pictures can be understood as simultaneously representing the potential foundations of black resistance and, in the idealised visual mode of this representation, exorcising any sense of real threat of that resistance. Afro-Caribbean Arcadias and the little black spots that ‘mark the Spots’: George Robertson’s pastoral plantations

In contrast to Brunias, most painters working for British colonial interests from the latter half of the eighteenth century through the early decades of the nineteenth paid little attention to people of colour. In fact, with the exception of Philip Wickstead (active 1763–86), who was primarily a portraitist in Jamaica, and Isaac Mendes Belisario, whose work is discussed later in this chapter, most paid little attention to people at all.13 Instead, the majority of artists working for colonial Britons in the West Indies concentrated on panoramic landscapes informed by European traditions of the pastoral and the picturesque, or produced topographical views designed to translate the geographical splendour of the West Indies to the print market. Significantly,

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most of these artists painted in well-established colonial settlements such as Jamaica rather than the upstart ones of the Ceded Islands. Notable among this group of artists were Thomas Hearne (1749–1817), who, directed by the governor of Antigua, produced a series of topographical views of that island in the 1770s; James Hakewill (1778–1843), who created a series of aquatints published in London in 1825 as A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, Drawings Made in the Years 1820 and 1821; Joseph Bartholomew Kidd ­­(1808–89), who also produced a series of views of Jamaica; and the accomplished landscape painter George Robertson, whose work for the Jamaican planter William Beckford of Somerly receives comprehensive treatment in this chapter.14 For the most part, these artists demonstrated little, if any, concern for representing the black and brown people who populated the West Indian landscapes that were their main focus. Certainly, direct references to plantation slavery, that fundamental institution of Caribbean colonial life that was growing increasingly controversial in Britain, are conspicuously absent from their work. Among the small group of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European artists working in the West Indies, Robertson was Brunias’s closest contemporary with respect to their periods of activity in the Caribbean. Robertson arrived in Jamaica in 1773 under the patronage of William Beckford of Somerly (1744–99). Beckford of Somerly (as he was known to avoid confusion with the many other Williams in his line) hailed from one of the foremost families of the British plantocratic class in Jamaica. The Beckfords’ history on the island spanned several generations, and the clan amassed a mighty fortune through their ventures in the West Indies.15 In 1767 Beckford of Somerly assumed responsibility for three Jamaican sugar plantations. Robertson, who had previously accompanied Beckford on the Grand Tour, travelled to the island with his patron and created a number of paintings featuring the planter’s Jamaican land holdings. Several of these were later reproduced as a set of six engravings by Daniel Lerpinière and published by John Boydell in 1778. In separate essays, both Geoff Quilley and Tim Barringer have offered keen insights into Robertson’s work, and their writings significantly inform the way in which I frame my own observations of Brunias’s art in relation to Robertson’s.16 Like A Descriptive Account of Jamaica (1790), Beckford of Somerly’s prose contribution to plantocratic arts and letters, Robertson’s images are ‘overwhelmingly concerned with the landscape’ and call upon European conventions of the pastoral and the picturesque.17 They underscore the natural abundance of the West Indian landscape, a tropical Arcadia whose produce, the gift of nature, scarcely requires cultivation, thereby conveniently erasing the gruelling reality of slave labour. Such images emphasise the islands as a ‘source of visual pleasure rather than a source of work’; in



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

contrast to Brunias’s images, in which the bodies and activities of Africans and Afro-Creoles take centre stage, in Robertson’s picturesque views, black people play a weak second fiddle to the land itself. Robertson’s almost exclusive attention to constructing a pastoral Jamaican landscape shifts the focus away from labour and, therefore, away from the dark truths of slavery and the plantation.18 As Geoff Quilley observes, ‘the commodification of the Jamaican landscape as picturesque is founded on a displacement of its material basis in plutocratic political economy … by its disassociation from the cultivated landscape, its disavowal of the plantation’.19 Robertson’s artistic transformation of Jamaica from plantation economy to pastoral Arcadia eliminates the necessity for slave labour in the image of the West Indies that colonialists sought to project, thereby effecting a simultaneous metamorphosis of the African and Afro-Creole bodies that inhabit the island. They are bodies whose presence cannot be denied but whose purpose, for the colonial idealist, must be. To accommodate this confluence of artistic reinvention, Robertson employs people of African descent as pastoral staffage, and the black body becomes a stock fixture of the West Indian scene, scarcely more than a feature of the landscape – a little black spot – that functions as a shorthand for marking the view as geographically Caribbean and explicitly colonial. Robertson’s landscapes, informed by the picturesque traditions established by Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, are the ‘product of a highly inflected and artificial combination of compositional and technical practices’ that transform ‘a complex ideological statement into a substitute for the countryside [or West Indian island] treated as if it were the “real thing”’.20 Representative of the whole, Robertson’s A View in the Island of Jamaica, of Part of the River Cobre near Spanish Town (fig. 22), known through Lerpinière’s engraving of 1778, depicts an awe-inspiring scene of lush natural beauty. Framed on three sides by a thick backdrop of trees scaled to showcase the island’s rugged, hilly terrain, Robertson presents a rustic gorge carved out of the landscape. Reiterating the exterior frame of tall trees, a curved band of uncultivated land, at once rocky and densely vegetated, is framed again by the bend of the roaring River Cobre on the left and a rudimentary cleared path on the right. These elements – the river and the road – highlight the amazing variety of Jamaica’s natural topography and, when read from left to right, their progression signifies the promise of colonial development. Meanwhile Robertson’s use of perspective, particularly the border of flat land at the foreground edge of the image, invites the viewer to join him ‘on the spot’ as a witness to this spectacular scene. Dwarfed by the awesomeness of the landscape, the presence of four tiny black figures punctuates the little path, providing an additional element of visual interest. In the foreground, a solitary black man carrying a log across

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22

Daniel Lerpinière after George Robertson, A View in the Island of Jamaica, of Part of the River Cobre near Spanish Town, 1778

his shoulder walks along the dirt road in bare feet. Simply dressed in unremarkable clothing, he wears an oversized white shirt and baggy, rolled-up trousers. Unstooped beneath the weight of his load, his nonchalant stance – with his right hand seeming to barely support the log and his left casually tucked into his pocket – suggests that his task constitutes no real burden. Further up the road, in the background, two turbaned women, one standing, the other on the ground, seem to engage in a commercial transaction while a man pushes a cattle-driven cart that promises to disappear behind the features of the landscape. With the scene meant more to convey a set of ideas or feelings than a sequence of events, none of these figures seems to perform an action necessary to the picture’s success, yet their presence is nonetheless required for the work to achieve its general effect. It would not be nearly the same image without them, for although they cannot compete with the landscape for the viewer’s attention, their black bodies – and not the landscape itself – mark the scene as a Caribbean one. Geoff Quilley cites one commentator’s review of four Jamaican landscapes submitted by Robertson to the Royal Society of Arts exhibition in 1777 to point to ‘the degree of displacement of the social economy of slavery facilitated by the [pastoral] aesthetic’ that allows the otherwise conspicuous absence of the



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

plantation to go unnoticed.21 The reviewer focuses solely on the merits of the work as a landscape, observing that: The Views are well-chosen; the Variety of Trees discover great Skill in the Painter. His Touch is free, the Fore-ground of his Pieces well finished, and he has omitted nothing that could mark the Spots; they cannot fail of pleasing People who have been on the Island, since they do one who never was there, and [I] only took Notice of them as being excellent Landscapes.22

Emphasising the implication of the last quoted phrase of the notice, Quilley uses the review to underscore the extent to which Robertson’s paintings invoked contemporary British landscape traditions and also pointed to the need to expand these conventions to accommodate Britain’s thriving colonial empire, such that Jamaican views might be ‘judged on equal terms alongside those of Tahiti, Ireland or Dovedale, or alongside an imaginative recreation of English rusticity such as Gainsborough’s Watering Place (1777)’.23 While agreeing with Quilley’s astute observation here, I want to shift the focus from the discussion of the function of landscape and the pastoral aesthetic to that of the little black figures who seemingly go unnoticed by the reviewer’s remarks, for it is precisely their bodies that distinguish this Caribbean scene from the views of the English countryside – or Tahiti, Ireland, or Dovedale for that matter. They, in other words, are the ‘spots’ that mark the spot as West Indian. Both Quilley and Barringer note the collateral effects of Robertson’s use of black figures as staffage in his pastoral plantation scenes, creating a tableau that, despite the physical presence of black people, denies the reality of slavery. Images such as Robertson’s that employ pastoral conventions to construct scenes of easy or non-existent labour create ‘a separation between them [black people] and the reason for their enslavement’, thereby naturalising the presence of people of African descent in the West Indies.24 Quilley observes that: Robertson, in creolizing the Jamaican landscape as pastoral imports foreign figures (African slaves) into a genre of landscape whose figures were conventionally assumed to be native inhabitants (such as the shepherds of Arcadia). Their naturalization into the Jamaican landscape is … a refutation of their originary African identity … in favour of a creolized Caribbean identity.25

Pushing Quilley’s assertion here even further, I would suggest that, particularly in light of the conspicuous absence of planters and other white people whose presence would inevitably remind the viewer of the role of the dark-skinned figures as forced labourers transplanted from their African homeland, black people become the de facto pseudo-indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean, thereby erasing both the Middle Passage and the suppression and extermination of the native Indians. Such an interpretation squares

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with Charmaine A. Nelson’s contention that ‘through landscape art … these initially and continually foreign black populations (for the slave ships kept coming) were indigenized in order to minimize the horrors of the British slave trade and slavery’.26 Another Robertson work highlights the naturalisation of the black body in Caribbean space to an even greater extent. Consistent with the artist’s oeuvre, Spring Head of the Roaring River (fig. 23) showcases a splendid Jamaican landscape, in this case a famed spot on Beckford’s Roaring River plantation. In the gloriously lit scene, a tiny black figure drives a herd of cattle through a stream bisecting a lush island forest teeming with a variety of rich foliage painted in an array of deep greens and vivid ochres. In the foreground, a cinnamon-skinned woman, simply dressed save for a glimmering choker of beads at her neck, holds a basket of produce at her hip, offering a morsel to a black man kneeling at her feet.27 Another basket, also teeming with the abundant gifts of the land, rests between them, confirming the status of the island as a tropical Arcadia. Barringer describes the effect of the work precisely, observing that ‘Robertson’s glamorous, enslaved Afro-Jamaican woman, as seen by a metropolitan audience in London, would perhaps have signified a Rousseauian figure of natural beauty’.28 Thus, Beckford’s sugar plantation – in truth the

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George Robertson, Spring Head of the Roaring River, 1775



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

Agostino Brunias, Mulatress Purchasing Fruit from a Negro Woman, mid-late eighteenth century

epitome of the unfeeling commercial venture – becomes an island Eden untouched by the evils of capitalist greed. Interestingly, Brunias painted several compositionally similar scenes depicting the exchange of produce, such as Mulatress Purchasing Fruit from a Negro Woman* (fig. 24); however, in these images, as in his many works showing Afro-Caribbeans as marginal figures selling the yield of their provision grounds at market, capitalism rather than compassion clearly drives the exchange, and, set in markets or villages rather than forests, there can be no doubt about the colonial rather than Arcadian space of the matter-of-fact transactions.29 Indeed, in contrast to Robertson’s suggestion of the islands as untouched tropical Arcadias conducive to the simple life, Brunias’s myriad market scenes, as lovely and idealised as they may be, nonetheless identify the West Indies as a place driven by profit, a centre of commerce rather than of compassion. While Robertson places black bodies in natural settings that ­­participate in the

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erasure of their forced migration and African past, Brunias’s emphasis on the black presence in the market – one of the quintessential sites defining West Indian colonial space – can be read as a subtle gesture towards the artificiality of their presence on the island and the commercial motivations behind this presence, even perhaps as a subtle allusion to the markets where once their persons were the ‘goods’ for sale. Looking at Afro-West Indians selling their produce and wares at market, Britons might choose to read the scene according to the plantocratic script, marvelling at how well-off they seemed. However, these tableaux also carry ironic subtexts as pictures of the entrepreneurial activities of those who owned not even themselves, and the possibility of recognising the West Indian colonial space as one created for the making of money rather than the enjoyment of Edenic environs. Building upon these observations – Quilley’s, Barringer’s, and my own – regarding Robertson’s use of the pastoral as a successful means of naturalising the black presence in the Caribbean, I want to assert a subtly but significantly different claim: that Robertson’s work also obscures the origins of colonialism and its necessity for forced labour without erasing the evidence of colonial power, that is, the African body. Robertson’s use of black figures in the mode of conventional pastoral staffage marks Jamaica as a quintessentially British colonial space, one in which colonial power – like the presence of Africans on the island – seems natural and inevitable such that it (along with, by extension, its elusive bedfellow, slavery) becomes an institution that has seemingly existed since time immemorial, a system so organic that it eludes representation. The uncultivated magnificence of Robertson’s vistas makes it easy to forget that they represent Beckford of Somerly’s extensive plantations, and yet that they do so is the only reason why they are recorded; this simultaneous forgetting and remembering is precisely the point of their existence. Thus, while not explicitly acknowledged in the critic’s notice, these darkskinned figures are indeed among the definitive features, in fact perhaps the most pivotal ones, that, as the reviewer observes, so adeptly ‘mark the Spots’, identifying the view as the British West Indies – particularly for ‘one who never was there’. They – these black spots that mark the spot – rather than the rugged gorge or the roaring river most immediately identify the view as a colonial Caribbean one. Without their presence, Robertson’s picture becomes a geographically generic representation of topographical variety and splendour. Ironically, in Robertson’s work, the presence of black-skinned figures identifies Jamaica as part of the British colonial world even though the conventions of the artist’s chosen aesthetic preclude any real evidence of the labour that necessitates this presence. In other words, this African presence serves as a subtle reminder of Britons’ role as ‘masters’ in the colonial dynamic without acknowledging any of the unpleasant details of what this role means or entails. Importantly, works such as these, which were sent back to England



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

Agostino Brunias, Natives Bathing in a River, n.d.

and publicly exhibited, helped define the image of the colonial West Indies – and, in turn, of West Indian slavery – for metropolitan Britons. Turning black spots into black people, or bringing staffage to life: imagining colonial Afro-Caribbean humanity in Brunias’s paintings

Brunias did paint at least three West Indian views that, like Robertson’s ­­pictures of Jamaica, showcase the sublime beauty of the Antillean landscape and are staffed by dark-skinned figures, among others. In two of these, Natives Bathing in a River (fig. 25) and View on the River Roseau, Dominica (fig. 26), both river views, the stunning landscape looms over the tiny people in the foreground, miniaturised groupings depicting the same types of figures, activities, and themes that the artist typically features on a much larger scale. The third, known as Natives on a Track Near a Village (fig. 27), showcases a clearing in a lush hillside gorge, peopled by five tiny figures also familiar from Brunias’s primarily human-focused oeuvre, and the choice of the word ‘Natives’ to describe the people of African descent in some of these works further underscores the naturalising of the black body as a West Indian body without an African past. These landscape works stand out as conspicuous anomalies relative to the artist’s general oeuvre, in which humans, specifically people of colour, rather than the environment command the viewer’s ­­attention, and the landscape is simply

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26

Agostino Brunias, View on the River Roseau, Dominica, 1770/80, oil on canvas, 84.1 x 158 cm (33 1/8 x 62 3/16 in.)

27

Agostino Brunias, Natives on a Track near a Village, n.d.

the backdrop against which human activity transpires. In fact, these paintings can be attributed to Brunias not because of the style or merit of the landscape but because of the easily identifiable figures, which, although ­­miniaturised, are recognisable hallmarks of his oeuvre.



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

Neither Robertson nor Brunias depicts enslaved Africans or Afro-Creoles hard at labour, and, upon initial inspection, viewers might well find Brunias’s gay dancing tableaux far more removed from the reality of plantation slavery than Robertson’s nonchalant pastoral labourers, who, at the very least, do work, if none too hard. However, while Robertson’s West Indian Arcadia replaces the reality of the back-breaking labour of plantation slavery with easy-going, non-strenuous work, Brunias’s pictures – rather than offering a bold-faced fiction regarding West Indian slave labour – simply do not attempt to represent it at all. In contrast to Robertson’s pictures, which imply the nonexploitative quality of black labour in the British Caribbean, where each lazy day stretches into the next, Brunias’s work avoids explicit comment on the quality or conditions of West Indian slave labour. It presents instead a different world entirely, often depicting black people in their own domain rather than the so-called master’s, and focusing on the interstices of leisure time that bondspeople managed to carve out for themselves. In their simultaneous representation of landscape and slavery, Robertson’s pastoral paintings stake a claim of ownership – of the land and the tiny black people who staff it – that makes both appear as natural as the landscape they exploit. Furthermore, while they feature Jamaican land and black bodies, their claim is about white identity; those little black spots mark Beckford of Somerly’s land and his place as a member of the plantocracy. Considering Brunias’s unique work in contrast to Robertson’s, I find it significant that Brunias’s images, rather than attempting to depict slave labour as something it clearly was not, simply do not represent it all. I do not mean to suggest that Brunias’s paintings of bondspeople at leisure aim to make a Genovese-esque statement about the resistant power of what enslaved people did in their own time (and I do grant that, based upon Brunias’s work, it would seem that they had nothing but leisure time, which was clearly far from the truth).30 Instead, I want to emphasise the singularity of Brunias’s depiction of Afro-Caribbeans, exploring how his pictures might be understood as celebrating the development of culture by black West Indians apart from – or at least despite – the systems and the people that oppressed them. William Young II, repeatedly referring to himself using supposedly Afro-Caribbean dialect as ‘Massa’ and calling the people whom he legally owned his ‘black friends’, describes how ‘his’ negroes would fall over themselves to meet him in the road ‘with such ecstacy of welcome’ that he feared never reaching the house.31 However, it is hard to imagine Brunias’s Africans and Afro-Creoles giving Young much of a second thought, much less going out of their way to embrace his knees or shake his hand out of any genuine feeling. Characteristic of one of the artist’s many West Indian dancing scenes, Handkerchief Dance on the Island of Dominica (fig. 28) provides a stunning

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example of Brunias’s depictions of enslaved Afro-Caribbeans in their own world.32 Demonstrating the painter’s primary concern with people as opposed to landscape, the work includes no less than twenty-three figures, all with distinctly detailed faces and costumes. The group congregates on a cleared patch of land before a simple wooden structure framed by a backdrop of leafy trees, unremarkable except, perhaps, for the token palm – signifier of the island location – inserted among them. A dense congregation contained between the crisp blue of the sky, the green of the trees, the wooden structure above and the tan patch of earth below, their bodies overlap to form a semi-circular ribbon of brown skins and bright fabrics. At the centre of the composition, a barefoot couple, perhaps a bride and groom, dressed all in white (save the red pattern on the man’s headwrap), dance a spirited jig and command  the  ­­attention of both the painted crowd and the viewer.33 The crisp white of the pair’s ensembles – particularly her elaborately wrapped headdress and the wide, scooping décolletage of her laced bodice – pops against the deep darkness of their ebony skin, which, thanks to the skill of Brunias’s brush, appears to glow, shining with the perspiration of their activity. The male figure strikes a strong pose, his arms akimbo, his back (though not his face) to the viewer, with one leg raised and turned to reveal his muscular body.34 The Africanist

28

Agostino Brunias, Handkerchief Dance on the Island of Dominica, n.d.



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

art ­­historian Robert Farris Thompson has identified this as an aggressive stance of Kongo origin that survived in the New World, a description that fits the man’s role as pursuer opposite his coy partner and reiterates the African origins of the celebrants. His female mate casts her eyes down demurely; she skips along daintily relative to her partner, with one hand raising the hem of her skirt as the other coquettishly offers him a handkerchief. A crowd gathers around the pair, spectating and urging the couple on. A plump woman near the centre of the action claps to the beat as another plays a rattle and a third raises her hands high as she taps a timbrel, an instrument that Nelson identifies as ‘a central part of the music created at African gatherings in the Caribbean’.35 Brunias has probably depicted the chica, or a very similar dance, which was popular in some form throughout the Caribbean, including the Windward Islands where Brunias worked.36 The chica, also known as the bamboula, featured at least one central couple (sometimes two or three) enveloped by a ring of active spectators.37 Europeans and white Creoles, including Moreau de Saint-Méry and Edward Long, documented the dance and its variants throughout the West Indies. Moreau de Saint-Méry noted the demure dancing of the ‘woman, who hold the ends of a kerchief or the sides of her skirt’, just as Brunias illustrates, while Long’s observations similarly conform to Brunias’s depiction.38 He described the female dancer as all languishing, and easy in her motions; [while] the man [was], all action, fire, and gesture; his whole person is variously turned and writhed every moment, and his limbs agitated with such lively exertions, as serve to display before his partner the vigour and elasticity of his muscles.39

Brunias’s coquettish female dancer, with her downcast gaze and demure offering of the handkerchief in response to the male dancer’s vigorous step, suggests that the artist has depicted the same type of dance witnessed by these observers. Towards the left of the standing crowd, two seated male drummers, their instruments cradled between their legs, provide a percussive beat for the dancers. Three figures and a fourth face on the right, noticeably paler than the other onlookers – though, significantly, clearly not white – and in conspicuously more elegant attire, appear slightly removed from the action, more spectators than involved participants. However, the members of this ostensibly well-off, mixed-race group are not the only figures to stand out in this diverse congregation of men and women whose assortment of clothing speaks to the influence of both Africa and the West. As a general rule, the cinnamon-skinned mulatresses in the group have more Western-influenced outfits with fitted bodices, neckerchiefs, and fine hats over elaborate headwraps, while their darker-skinned counterparts wear ensembles more reminiscent of Africa – wide, full skirts slung low around thick hips with handkerchief sashes tied just

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below their bottoms to emphasise their behinds. Their ample skirts are paired with loose blouses, tops improvised from squares of fabric, or, in several cases, no top at all. In toto, the women’s ensembles – each thoroughly hybrid in its own way – signify varying degrees of remove from Africa and exposure to European culture. While the clothing of the female dancer and the mixed-race female spectator clearly betray a primarily Western influence, a topless woman in a mustard-coloured skirt stands just to the right of the male dancer, a kerchief pulled over her ears and tied round her neck in a distinctive style that may suggest her African, rather than Afro-Creole, roots. Together the two figures represent the spectrum of diversity in communities of African descent. Significantly, in underscoring the African quality of black dance in the islands, Brunias’s images demonstrate little similarity to the numerous references to dance by Young or to the ‘Negro balls’ described by Mrs A. C. Carmichael in her account of five years spent in St Vincent.40 For example, on Young’s plantation, to the accompaniment not of drums but of ‘two negro fiddlers and a tambourine’, enslaved black people ‘had a very smart Negro ball in the hall’ of the old mansion where they ‘danced an excellent minuet, and … a dance not unlike a Scotch reel’.41 Young’s description of Europeanstyle instruments, British dance forms, and indoor festivities aims to show the ‘civilising’ influence of slavery on people of African descent by showing the degree to which they have embraced European culture, while Brunias’s paintings highlight and respect the African and Afro-Creole cultural forms that were uniquely their own. Ultimately, Robertson’s landscapes obscure the African origins of black West Indians, recasting them as pseudo-indigenes rather than forced migrants. In contrast, the style of dance Brunias records, the participants’ costumes, and the location of their activity in an obviously black-dominated social space set away from the planters’ world all work to underscore the African-ness of the scene at hand. Where Robertson creates a mythic, ahistorical Arcadian landscape that disguises the colonial power that it implicitly supports, Brunias paints a definitively colonial space that underscores the merger of Africa and Europe. Firmly rooted in the eighteenth-century colonial present rather than a timeless Caribbean Arcadia, Brunias’s work, in its simultaneous highlighting of both cultural hybridity and African roots, clearly depicts a world in transition, calling attention to the in-process project of British colonisation and the participation of Africans and Afro-Creoles in this process. From black spots in pastoral paradise to black spectacles in a nascent metropolis: Isaac Mendes Belisario’s black figures and the white colonial gaze

In his essay on George Robertson, Tim Barringer comments on the work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British artists working in Jamaica,



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

­­ observing their conspicuous lack of concern with imaging the black and brown bodies, much less depicting the actual lives of black and brown people, that maintained the island’s plantation economy; he eloquently writes: ‘Neither the picturesque landscape nor the map nor the surveyor’s documentary drawing could find a way to represent slavery. In the mind of the plantocracy, only the balance sheet could enumerate the human beings.’42 The striking lack of attention paid to Africans and Afro-Creoles by painters working in the colonial Caribbean invites an inevitable comparison between the work of the two artists who did train their eyes on the enslaved or formerly enslaved population in particular: Brunias in the eighteenth century and the British-trained, Jewish Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes Belisario in the nineteenth. In 1837–38, Belisario, a native of Kingston who had also lived and trained in London, issued a series of lithographs entitled Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica.43 The plates were designed and engraved by the artist and printed by the pioneering lithographer Adolphe Duperly. Belisario apparently intended to issue the series in twelve parts but only produced three, each accompanied by a text written by the artist. The first two parts provided vivid illustrations of the festivities put on by Kingston’s black population during the Christmas holiday season, focusing particularly on the ‘Set-Girls’ and the ‘Actor-Boys’ and on the tradition of the Jonkonnu. The third part primarily depicted black labourers but also included a final chart-like plate featuring an enumerated visual taxonomy of four bust portraits collectively labelled ‘Creole Negroes’ (fig. 49). Minus this final chart, the work amounted to a colonial Caribbean version of the centuries-old European ‘Cries’ tradition of representing the urban street in which street vendors, beggars, performers, and the like were imagined as the urban ‘folk’. In sharp contrast to Robertson’s pastoral landscapes which construct the colonial Caribbean as a tropical Eden, Belisario’s ‘Kingston Cries’ assert that his native city was ‘not simply a rude colonial outpost, but also an urban center of enough sophistication to generate a well-established print form [i.e. the Cries] closely associated with London and continental capitals’.44 Particularly given the dearth of images focusing on Africans and AfroCreoles created by European artists working in the colonial British Caribbean, the apparent similarity of Brunias’s and Belisario’s subject matter – the depiction of black colonial bodies and interest in Afro-Creole culture, especially dance, and the vivid depiction of black dress – has tended to prompt discussion, disproportionate in my view, of the parallels between these two bodies of work rather than a focus on the important divergences that distinguish them. Ironically, Belisario tends to emerge from this comparison as the more complicated – and, incidentally, the more progressive – of the two

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­­ artists. For example, Brunias is rather summarily dismissed as the plantocracy’s hired brush whose images deny the ‘ever-present possibility of insurrection’, in that ‘potentially subversive activities such as dancing and fighting are presented as ritualised and orderly’, and whose work ‘invariably presented his subjects as types rather than individuals, drawing on the discourse of ethnology and natural history’.45 In contrast, Belisario’s work is described as ‘characteristically ambivalent’ and ‘freighted with profound  – though complex and ambiguous – historical significance’ and ‘deeply resistant to attempts to read it as a homogenous work’.46 These are descriptions that, as my arguments throughout this book aim to demonstrate, suit Brunias’s work precisely, and that, as I contend in this chapter, are arguably more problematic when applied to Belisario. In addition to the superficial similarity of the otherwise rare subject matter that unites the work of Brunias and Belisario, inviting inevitable comparison, the status of both artists as outside the Anglo-Protestant circles to which they catered merits consideration. Given that they focused their attention on the black West Indian population while other colonial artists conspicuously avoided featuring people of African descent, it is tempting to speculate about how their relative outsider status – Brunias as an Italian Catholic and Belisario as a Jew – vis-à-vis the elite British plantocrats who employed them might have informed their choice of material. Holly Snyder deftly describes the status of Jews in Belisario’s Jamaica: Although Jews were nominally of free [and of] European origin and therefore experienced neither the utterly degraded position of the enslaved nor the undesirable condition of those who arrived under the indenture of servitude, they were nonetheless stigmatized as non-white by the Anglo-Jamaican elite. As Maria, Lady Nugent, the wife of the British governor of the island, observed the population ‘of all colours and descriptions’ attending the Spanish Town theater in 1803, she distinguished four separate elements among the audience: ‘blacks, browns, Jews, and whites.’ Jamaica’s Jews, in the eyes of Lady Nugent and other Anglo-Jamaicans were thus not ‘black’ or ‘brown’ – but they were also not ‘white’.47

Despite their shared Otherness, however, it is important to note that Brunias and Belisario were not ‘Others’ to an equal extent. Although little more than half a century separates the work of the two artists, dramatic historical changes during this period – and specifically, the way in which each artist’s personal identity may have informed his estimation of the significance of these changes – account for important differences in their focus. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, England both terminated its participation in the international slave trade and, in 1834, established a programme of gradual



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

abolition of slavery in the West Indian colonies. In anticipation of this process, Jamaica granted full civil rights to Jews in 1831. While Brunias was unequivocally a foreigner who roughly twenty years before his activity in the Caribbean could not even speak English and who had no identifiable family, community, or social  status in the Caribbean, the Jamaican-born, London-trained and educated, and now fully enfranchised Belisario came from a prominent  Jewish family that included a notable London rabbi as well as wealthy merchants and slaveholders. Therefore, while Brunias’s affinities meant that his gaze was  arguably fixed on the humanity of those who lived on the margins, Belisario had a vested interest in representing the life of Jamaica’s increasingly diverse body public – a body that now included ­himself – and in representing it such that he might count himself among its elite. Thus, it behooved Belisario to distinguish himself from the ‘creole negroes’ who  would soon progress from  apprenticeship to full freedom, a move that might allow him to ‘graduate’ from ‘not-black’ to white and one accomplished by participating – visually and verbally – in the racialist rhetoric of the day.48 Thus, while Brunias provides the viewer with a private glimpse of a burgeoning Afro-Creole colonial culture typically unavailable to white eyes,  Belisario,  working during the pivotal transition from slavery to apprenticeship and eventually freedom, concerns himself with depicting the place  of  the black body in the cosmopolitan sphere of the Jamaican  public.  Comparing Belisario’s images of holiday revelry to Brunias’s depictions of Afro-Caribbean dancing, I urge a re-evaluation of the work of both artists. Using Belisario’s work as a lens through which to view Brunias’s images, I aim to bring into relief the aspects of Brunias’s depictions of Africans and Afro-Creoles that undermine the plantocratic script that his pictures reputedly illustrate so well. In doing so, I also highlight the arguably reactionary elements  in  Belisario’s work that nostalgically romanticise the image of black people during the period of West Indian slavery and  apprenticeship.  In contrast to Brunias’s scenes, very much the product of the transitional  moment of his eighteenth-century colonial present, Belisario simultaneously looks forward to the moment of black freedom while looking backward somewhat nostalgically on the past. Moreover, whereas Brunias’s depictions of Afro-Creole culture underscore its existence  apart from whites, Belisario’s work in Sketches of Character shows black West Indians exclusively through the white colonial gaze and as part of the cosmopolitan identity Belisario aims to construct through his work. Primarily comprised of both crowded scenes of performers set in the public square and full-length portraits of black workers, Belisario’s Sketches of Character, rather than providing his viewers with an image of something

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29

Isaac Mendes Belisario, ‘Koo, Koo, or Actor Boy’, plate 6, from Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica, 1837, lithograph with watercolour



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

new, aimed to deliver a record of people and activities that would have been familiar to his almost exclusively Jamaican clientele.49 Suggesting that Belisario intended for Sketches of Character to help in ‘constructing a new  distinctive cultural identity for his native Jamaica at a unique moment  in its complex and troubled history’, Gillian Forrester offers the optimistic possibility that the artist’s ‘largely sympathetic images of the formerly enslaved  … [imply] that on becoming “full free” they will perform their role as citizens in the creation of a new order for Jamaica’.50 Although I do not entirely disagree with Forrester here, one could certainly debate the extent  to which Belisario’s images, which even Forrester admits often slip ‘perilously close to caricature’, constitute a sensitive, sympathetic, or particularly forward-thinking  portrayal of Afro-Jamaicans.51 In the letterpress accompanying the plates, Belisario maintains that his renderings aim to follow nature,  ‘steering clear of Caricature: nature in her ordinary form alone, having been the  source from whence all the original drawings  were  derived’.52 Forrester  speculates that Belisario made this claim to distinguish his ‘characters’ from the more offensive ‘caricatures’ such as Gabriel Tregear’s Black Jokes, Being a Series of Laughable Caricatures on the March of Manners Amongst Blacks that had recently appeared on the British market. Tregear’s six original prints were largely based on Edward Williams Clay’s series Life in Philadelphia, issued in the United States from 1828 to 1830. Inspired by white anxieties prompted by the spectre of black emancipation, both sets of images depict the antics of buffoonish black people aping white high society and culture, and exploit ridiculous distortions of black physiognomy to underscore the joke.53 However, as Kay Dian Kriz observes in her analysis of Belisario’s work, in the context of 1830s Jamaica, where a black majority eclipsed the white population by a margin of ten to one, the ‘prospect of former slaves swamping the institutions of polite white culture was no laughing matter’.54 Still, Kriz notes that Belisario ‘draws on many of the same negro stereotypes that structure the prints of Treagar and Clay’.55 Indeed, Belisario’s depictions of black physiognomy – exaggeratedly white eyeballs and teeth (what the artist himself describes as ‘the pearly whiteness of teeth so universal with negroes’),56 hyperbolically broad noses, pronounced jaws, full lips, and even simian hands – demonstrate none of the sensitivity or meticulousness of Brunias’s brush. Read in light of the caricature tradition that included Black Jokes and Life in Philadelphia, Belisario’s numerous images of the holiday masquerades, which depict black people in exaggerated get-ups and donning whiteface masks in over-the-top imitations of whiteness and the power of the white elite, seem not so very different from the satirical prints. Such works imply that, while black people may want to ‘try-on’ the status accorded to whiteness,

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it is somehow incongruous with the black body, that it can only ever be a ‘puton’. Moreover, in recording such images Belisario excludes himself from their implications, instead seeking to include himself in a community of colonial whites knowledgeable enough to critique – and poke fun at – the pretensions of Creole negroes. Belisario accounts for his less-than-flattering images of people of African descent, attributing them to nature’s sometimes humorous – even ­unintentional – vicissitudes, and claiming to follow nature’s line ‘however amusing her accidental deviations from that course of admiring the human shape, may prove to the admirers of the ludicrous’.57 Moreover, the nostalgic tone of much of the letterpress, which describes the project’s purpose to ‘hand down faithful delineations of a people whose habits, manners, and costume, bear the stamp of originality, and … are being daily effected by the rapid strides of civilization’, suggests a desire to create a visual document of the supposedly good old days before emancipation.58 Such nostalgia highlights the theatrical quality of the images, particularly the depictions of holiday revels, which produce black bodies and cultural activities as elaborate public displays for white consumption.59 Parading through public city streets, the holiday revellers whom Belisario  records perform for white viewers, while his water-jar sellers, milkwoman, and chimneysweep aim to attract their business. In other words,  Belisario’s black bodies exist only for the white gaze and to supply the needs – both psychic and material – of British colonials. ‘French Set-Girls’  (fig. 30), a plate from Sketches of Character that pairs particularly well  with Brunias’s Handkerchief Dance, exemplifies this quality of Belisario’s work.  Like Handkerchief Dance, ‘French Set-Girls’ features a dancing couple, this time placed to the far left of the frame, among other revellers and two drummers in front of a building. However, while Brunias presents a community of Afro-West Indians who perform for themselves, their bodies oriented  towards each other and the centre of the work to underscore this inward focus, Belisario’s featured performers, their clasped hands raised  high in the air, initially seem to dance together but actually direct their attention and their bodies not towards each other but outwards towards the viewer.  Similarly, the drummer in the pink shirt, short tie, and white braces straddles his drum facing the viewer; his face is likewise frontally oriented and only his eyes, ever so subtly shifted towards the dancing couple, offer any suggestion of his connection to them. Moreover, this figure’s simian hands, more like a monkey’s than a man’s, recall the comments of colonialists such as Edward Long who considered people of African descent a lower species along the order of primates and contrast sharply with the uncompromising sense of humanity with which Brunias depicts the black body.60 The framing of the scene, an enclosure of man-made ele-



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

Isaac Mendes Belisario, ‘French Set-Girls’, from Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica, 1837, lithograph with watercolour

ments, forms a stage set of brick floor and wooden structure that contrasts with Brunias’s open sky and foliage and underscores the theatricality of the Belisario work. These black people perform not so much for themselves and each other as for the white colonial gaze. Depicted either as servants or spectacles, Belisario’s black figures lack the humanity or sense of independent agency with which Brunias endows his featured African and Afro-Creole subjects.61 In contrast to Belisario’s characters who perform a British colonial version of the old shuck and jive in the crowded streets of Kingston, Brunias’s musicians and dancers conduct their self-directed activities away from the public square in Afro-Creole spaces defined by black Caribbean culture. While Belisario’s Afro-Jamaicans appear hyperconscious of the white audience for which they perform, Brunias’s African and Afro-Creole musicians and dancers do not put on a show so much as they participate in one – produced by and for no one but themselves.62

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Seeing black humanity: Handkerchief Dance and Plantation Scene, two rare examples

Handkerchief Dance on the Island of Dominica represents one of several Brunias images that feature the lives of dark-skinned Africans and AfroCreoles as the primary subject of interest; however, Brunias’s concern with depicting black people and the sensitivity with which he does so is virtually unparalleled in the vast archive of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century circum-Atlantic visual culture. Indeed, an anonymous watercolour in the collection of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center known as Plantation Scene (fig. 31), the only known example of a painting from the United States that represents black people by themselves and concerned only with themselves, may be the only extant work truly comparable to Brunias’s oeuvre in its depiction of enslaved black people. Like the dancing scenes in Brunias’s work, Plantation Scene portrays an independent black world and distinctly Afro-Creole colonial culture with obvious African influences.63 Reading this work in relation to Brunias’s and to a third painting, Christian Mayr’s Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Springs,Virginia (fig. 32), demonstrates just how challenging, meaningful, and important these rare images are. Like Handkerchief Dance, Plantation Scene centres around a dance. In what may also be a wedding scene, a barefoot man in a blue jacket and red breeches engages in a lively step while holding a stick across his body.

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Unknown artist (recent attribution to John Rose), Plantation Scene (also known as Old Plantation), c. 1780–90, watercolour on laid paper



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

Christian Friedrich Mayr, Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Spring, Virginia, 1838, oil on canvas, 61 x 74.9 cm

Meanwhile, two women, one in green and one in white, strike more demure poses, dancing with handkerchiefs strung between their hands and positioned to echo the man’s stick. Setting the scene in a definitively black domain at the bend of a bright blue stream, the artist has carefully composed the image to underscore the blackness of the space in which it takes place and its remove from the world of the white ‘master’. In the gap between the one male dancer and his two female companions, the viewer notes the blue ribbon of water just behind them and across it the main buildings of the plantation, including the now tiny ‘big house’ with its tall chimney rising above the other structures. The miniaturised main building of the plantation signals not only its physical distance from the bondsfolks’ activities but that, at least in this image and the world that it depicts, both the ‘big house’ and its inhabitants are essentially inconsequential. They comprise the backdrop rather than the focus, framing rather than controlling the space. In the foreground, the dancers are surrounded on either side by a group of their fellows, more or less oriented in their direction and engaged in various types of leisurely behaviour. Importantly, even when the figures are not oriented towards the dancing couple, they direct their attention to their peers,

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never the viewer. In contrast to Belisario’s work and like Brunias’s, the black people in Plantation Scene concern themselves with themselves rather than performing for the viewer’s gaze. On the right a kerchiefed woman in a white dress converses with a bearded man in a high-necked shirt and red jacket while two musicians, a drummer and a man playing a rudimentary sort of banjo, accompany the dancers. On the left three watch the action while a fourth talks to a curly-haired woman in a scarlet frock; however, she is apparently already spoken for: one of the other men, his arm around her shoulder, rests his hand on the ample bosom shown off to great advantage by the neckline of her dress. Cropped plantation outbuildings, whose relative size looms large in comparison to the tiny ‘main’ plantation structures across the way, underscore the blackness of the domain represented. They frame both groups of figures, anchoring either side of the composition and working to direct the viewer’s focus to the dancers in the centre of the image while contributing to the sense that this is but a cropped slice of a larger picture of black life. Both Plantation Scene and Brunias’s Handkerchief Dance highlight the specific architecture of enslavement in the eighteenth-century Americas and its potential to support the development of black cultural spaces that were beyond the planter’s easy oversight.64 During this early period, before the convention was established of setting black quarters out in rows to more easily police the activities of enslaved men and women, Africans and Afro-Creoles had significant influence on the structure and placement of their dwellings. For example, observing black quarters during his tour of St Vincent the second William Young relates: In St. Vincent’s the negro houses are of no fixed dimensions; some are very large and some very small, according to the fancy or ability of the negroes … Thus the village is irregular, some houses boarded, some of them stone and part boards, and most of them wattled or thatched.65

Moreover, when allowed to arrange their own spaces, enslaved people of African descent often created structures whose form, dimensions, and function resembled those of their ancestral homeland. For example, Tahro, who came from the Kongo Angola region to the Americas in 1858 aboard the Wanderer, a slaver operating illegally after the abolition of the trade, built a home for himself that was, he claimed, just like the one he had in Africa. The single room, A-frame house, with a single door at one of the two gabled ends and a thatched roof, which he built on an Edgefield, South Carolina plantation in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, also resembles the structures in both Plantation Scene and Brunias’s Handkerchief Dance, suggesting African influence at least in terms of their organisation of space.66 Although there are some important differences – the dwellings in Plantation Scene have shingled roofs and the structure in Handkerchief Dance, in addition to being



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

significantly taller (perhaps with a loft), boasts a window – the similarity of the structures is noteworthy.67 The relatively small size of homes for enslaved black people also meant that, as in many cultures in Africa, activities such as cooking and socialising took place in outdoor communal space, a fact evident in both Plantation Scene and Handkerchief Dance. Moreover, the rather haphazard layout of black quarters at this time meant that such outdoor communal spaces could be relatively private, free of easy surveillance from whites and perfect for the sort of festivities depicted by Brunias and the painter of Plantation Scene. The small, simple structures built by enslaved people no doubt worked for the  planters, who had little regard for the needs of black men and women in the first place, but they could simultaneously be appreciated by enslaved men and women as conducive to the survival of African culture and values in the New World. Therefore, the African influence of these spaces was marked not only in the bodies of their inhabitants and the activities that transpired there but inscribed into the built environment itself as Africans and Afro-Creoles in the New World adapted African architectural forms to fit their new surroundings. Given the emphasis on black humanity and African cultural influences in the Americas present in Brunias’s works and in Plantation Scene, the Germanborn American artist Christian Mayr’s Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Springs, Virginia of 1838 (fig. 32) provides an interesting counterpoint. Like Brunias and the unknown artist of Plantation Scene, Mayr depicts a dancing scene in which people of African descent are the exclusive focus (again, quite possibly a wedding, given that the star couple dancing slightly to the right of centre is decked out in entirely white, quite elegant attire). Moreover, like the other two artists, Mayr individualises every figure in the large group that he paints, using costume, hairstyle, skin tone, and activity to create a unique identity for each. However, important differences distinguish Mayr’s later work from its eighteenth-century predecessors, emphasising the importance of Brunias’s depictions of Africans and Afro-Creoles to the archive of images of enslaved people of African descent. For example, while Mayr’s scene does highlight the independent activity of its subjects outside the expected image of slavery, underscoring their identity as human beings rather than ‘slaves’, this painting also reinforces the plantocratic notion of the ‘civilising’ effect of slavery on people of African descent, conforming more to the description of dance offered in colonialist accounts such as those of Young or Carmichael. Unlike the celebrants in Brunias’s paintings (or those in Plantation Scene), none of the figures in Mayr’s work that initially command the viewer’s attention – the ostensible bride and groom and the couple conversing in the right corner, for example – retain any trace of their African past. Mayr’s black figures are not particularly dark-skinned nor do they generally possess characteristically African features

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or perform any activity that explicitly suggests any African influence; instead, they appear thoroughly Westernised. Dressed in seemingly fashionable, thoroughly Western ensembles including shoes and other accessories such as white stockings for the bride and a flirty red fan for one of the female guests in the foreground, they dance a restrained European-style step to the accompaniment not of banjo or drums but violin, cello, and flute. Architecturally, the spacious domestic interior in which their celebration takes place – the floor cleared of workaday items for the occasion and the room softly lit by the glow of candlelight – contrasts sharply with the outdoor surroundings of Handkerchief Dance or Plantation Scene and conforms to the image of the Negro Ball that so fascinated British commentators. Were the dark faces in Mayr’s Kitchen Ball hypothetically replaced with white ones and all else to remain the same, the work would strongly resemble other genre pieces of the same period such as The Country Wedding by Mayr’s fellow German-born American John Lewis Krimmel or William Sidney Mount’s Rustic Dance After a Sleigh Ride.68

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Agostino Brunias, The Handkerchief Dance, c. 1770–80, oil on canvas, 31.7 x 25.4 cm



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

However, not merely whites in blackface, the black dancers in Handkerchief Dance and Plantation Scene are clearly of African descent, both physically and culturally. Their range of brown complexions, African-style instruments, and particularly the composition of the activity that transpires in both images contribute to the general Afro-New World ambience that both pictures convey. Taking place out-of-doors and involving a string of black congregants stretched across the foregrounds of the pictures, these images have the feeling of ritual about them. The style of dance – arms akimbo, bare feet striking the ground in the Brunias work or arms outstretched with baton thrust squarely forward in Plantation Scene, particularly when compared to the graceful twirls of the couple in Kitchen Ball – suggests that the images capture something more significant than a leisurely romp around the dance floor. The scarcity of images of people of African descent such as those recorded by Brunias and the unknown artist of Plantation Scene is surprising given that black people played such a defining role in shaping the British colonial Caribbean and the American South. However, these works are not only exceptional simply because they represent black people, most or all of whom were certainly enslaved, but because they do so in a way that respects the humanity of their subjects and aims to define their lives outside of the world of the plantation and the whites who claimed to own them. Moreover, though each artist depicts a mass congregation of black folk, by taking great care to differentiate the individuals in the crowd, both Brunias and the painter of Plantation Scene avoid creating a monolithic vision of black identity in which one black body easily stands in for another. While all of the people in Plantation Scene seem to share a similar status, as suggested by their clothing and universally bare feet, and each is rendered in roughly the same shade of brown, their faces – some long, some round, some bearded, some not, some with receding hairlines, others with heads full of curls or covered by kerchiefs – individualise them. Moreover, while Brunias certainly recycled certain figures in his oeuvre (including the dancing couple and musicians in Handkerchief Dance), using them in multiple compositions, I would argue that within an individual work, Brunias fought against the notion of ‘type’ by including a diverse assembly of individuals of African descent – black, brown, and relatively pale; half-naked, in tatters, and elegantly dressed; almost certainly enslaved and most likely free – to create a complex picture of Afro-Caribbean life. In contrast to the narratives of British colonials that stress black people’s love for and dependence on their so-called masters, and unlike the picturesque plantation landscapes of George Robertson or the colourful black caricatures of Belisario, many of Agostino Brunias’s works develop a picture of an explicitly Afro-Caribbean world, a place in which whites have no significant point of entry. In depicting ostensibly enslaved people of African descent in their own worlds, relatively free from white control, Brunias, like the artist of

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Plantation Scene, provides a privileged glimpse of activities typically unavailable to white viewers. In an essay critiquing Belisario’s images of colonial Afro-Jamaican Christmas festivities, the historian of black music Kenneth Bilby prefaces his work with an imaginative recreation of the private rituals behind the public Jonkonno revelries, arguing that ‘Belisario was oblivious to such behindthe-scenes preparations, and the spiritual meanings associated with them … [and that viewers are] limited by the artist’s focus on events visible to him’, resulting in what Bilby describes as a ‘vast lacuna’.69 While Mayr’s Kitchen Ball clearly took place with the knowledge and very probably the sponsorship of white slaveholders, Brunias’s images of African and Afro-Creole dancers in the Lesser Antilles made a world generally invisible to white settlers somewhat more visible, offering a snapshot of behind-the-scenes black humanity rather than a spectacle staged expressly for white people. Thinking about the markedly paler face of the casually dressed man who leans nonchalantly in the doorframe of one of the aforementioned ‘negro dwellings’ observing the action of the black ‘cudgellers’ in Brunias’s print Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in the Island of Dominica (fig. 34), one wonders about the artist’s place in all this, his access to this otherwise privileged view.70 The figure’s comfort with the people and the space, signed in his easy pose, as if he is perfectly at home in this otherwise black domain, suggests an exceptional degree of personal intimacy with African and Afro-Creole culture unseen in conventional plantation imagery. On the one hand, this all-access view, supporting the planter’s self-­ perception of omniscience, could comfort whites by validating the stereotype of the happy dancing negro who spent his off hours harmlessly tripping the light fantastic with his fellows rather than devising elaborate plots against those who called themselves his masters. On the other, Brunias’s images of black West Indians also depict those very mechanisms – black community, culture, and agency – that made resistance to slavery and colonial oppression possible. The endurance of the subversive rhythm of the African drum  – periodically banned throughout North America and the Caribbean ‘since it was thought too much inciting them [enslaved people] to Rebellion’ – is rarely mentioned in idealised plantocratic accounts of the West Indies, yet black drummers provide the beat in every black dancing scene that Brunias is known to have painted.71 Brunias’s clearly idealised pictures of black life can be understood as exorcising without excising the potential threat that activities such as drumming, dancing, and stick fighting historically represented to whites, painting a pretty picture of events that might otherwise have been perceived as menacing. Like a capoeira play that made a potentially rebellious fighting sequence appear to be an innocent dance, Brunias’s elegant compositions obscured



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

Print made by Agostino Brunias, A Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in the Island of Dominica, 1779, stipple engraving and etching with hand colouring on moderately thick, slightly textured, beige wove paper

the potentially resistant nature of the activities they depicted in graceful lines and lovely colours, allowing them to simultaneously satisfy the tastes of his patrons while still documenting the humanity and culture of his subjects and alluding, however subtly, to their potential mechanisms of both spiritual and mental survival and, perhaps, even organised resistance. Agostino Brunias stands out among European painters working in the British West Indies for his attention to representing the humanity and cultural agency of Afro-Caribbeans. Some of his peers, such as George Robertson, generally eschewed representations of the black body in any significant way. Preferring to paint West Indian Arcadias, they used tiny black staffage figures in lush landscapes to mark the scenes as Caribbean, obscure the need for slave labour, and naturalise the presence of Africans in the islands. Artists such as Isaac Mendes Belisario, who did turn their attention to black West Indians, tended to provide images of black life staged for the white colonial gaze. Only Brunias attempts to engage with Afro-Caribbean humanity and culture, to any extent, on its own terms. Although his images of black

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dancers – composed with elegant lines and a calming, unified colour palette whose consistency produces a sense of order – certainly appealed to planters, they also offered an unmatched depiction of West Indians of African descent continuing and creating their own vibrant culture. Although the story of the coat buttons that opened this chapter almost certainly represents a fanciful cultural fiction, ultimately it seems entirely within the realm of possibility that Toussaint L’Ouverture might have gazed upon Brunias’s uncompromising pictures of black humanity and smiled. Notes 1 Pope-Hennessy, Sins of the Fathers, p. 114. 2 I discovered both of the following examples thanks to the careful scholarship of Kay Dian Kriz who references them in the notes to her chapter on Brunias’s mulatress pictures; see Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 212, note 32. 3 [James Tobin], Cursory Remarks upon the Reverend Mr. Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the Sugar Colonies (London: G. and T. Wilkie, 1785), p. 98. 4 ‘No Abolition of Slavery; or, The Universal Empire of Love’, Gentlemen’s Magazine 6.1 (April 1791), p. 358. 5 Nelson, Slavery, Geography, and Empire, p. 237. On islands with significant amounts of land that was unsuited to plantation agriculture, such as Jamaica, planters often allotted larger tracts of land to bondspeople who were expected to provide for their own subsistence from its cultivation. On islands where allocating land to produce food for enslaved people would reduce the acreage available for planting more profitable crops, planters took responsibility for feeding the enslaved labour force, largely importing food to do so. For more information on provision grounds, see Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘An Economic Life of Their Own: Slaves as Commodity Producers and Distributors in Barbados’, in Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (eds), Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1997), pp. 732–742. 6 Beckles, ‘An Economic Life of their Own’, p. 732. 7 Ibid. 8 It should be noted that the lavishly outfitted woman in A Mother with her Son and a Pony is curiously barefoot, as is her son. As observed in the previous chapter, Buckridge and Nelson both associate shoelessness with presumably enslaved status. Nonetheless, she remains a remarkable and perplexing figure in Brunias’s oeuvre. An even more curious work, Servants Washing a Deer (fig. 20), also depicts a figure in a floral skirt atypical of Brunias’s oeuvre, but the woman is far more modestly dressed. 9 Hugh Honour notes that not until the very end of the eighteenth century, largely owing to new ideas about ‘artistic independence’, did European artists begin to



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explore black subject matter on any significant scale; see Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, pt 1 (Houston: Menil Foundation, 1989), p. 15. 10 The establishment in London in 1787 of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade marked the rise of the organised British abolitionist movement. George Morland’s Execrable Human Traffic (1788) is the first known painting to depict the slave trade. Morland followed this work with African Hospitality in  1790. Both were produced as prints (and probably painted with this end in mind); see Honour, The Image of the Black, vol. 4, pt 1, pp. 67–72. 11 Ibid., p. 19. 12 While Plantation Scene has been conventionally known by the title Old Plantation, I have determined to use the work’s alternative accepted title, employed by John Michael Vlach and others, in order to avoid the nostalgia for slavery that ‘Old Plantation’ might be seen to evoke. Moreover, because there does not yet seem to be a scholarly consensus regarding Susan Shames’s recent attribution of the painting to the South Carolina planter John Rose and because a change in attribution would not significantly alter my argument, I have also retained the conventional designation of the artist as unknown. However, for Shames’s fascinating research into the painting and Rose as its possible creator, see Shames, The Old Plantation: The Artist Revealed (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2010). 13 Like Robertson, Wickstead was an Englishman who arrived in Jamaica under the patronage of William Beckford of Somerly. Once there, he supported himself by painting portraits of planters and their families. Like many of the other Britishidentified artists in the islands, including Robertson and Brunias, Wickstead sent pictures to London for exhibition with the Society of Artists, and one of these, Mulatto Woman Teaching Needlework to Negro Girls (exhibited in 1777; now lost), indicates that, when not painting portraits for his bread and butter, he may have shared some concerns with Brunias. For discussion of Wickstead, his portrait practice, and the portrait of an unknown white woman attributed to him, see Chapter 3, note 51 below. For more information, see Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 215, note 63. See also Frank Cundall, ‘Philip Wickstead of Jamaica’, Connoisseur, 94 (1934), pp. 174–175. 14 Kay Dian Kriz features the work of Joseph Kidd and also discusses James Hakewill in her chapter on picturing the Jamaican landscape; see Kriz, ‘Torrid Zones and Detoxified Landscapes: Picturing Jamaica, 1825–1840’ in Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, pp. 157–193. Charmaine A. Nelson’s previously cited Slavery, Geography, and Empire offers a comprehensive treatment of Hakewill and offers rigorous discussion of Kidd. Jill H. Casid discusses George Robertson’s images particularly in relationship to the text, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, written by his patron, William Beckford of Somerly, and published in London in 1790, for which the artist was apparently meant to provide illustrations; see Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Both Tim Barringer and Geoff Quilley have offered insight into Robertson’s work that has informed my own arguments in this chapter (see citations in note 15 to this chapter).

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15 As Charmaine A. Nelson records, despite his family’s wealth, in 1777 Beckford of Somerly was apparently forced to leave Jamaica for debtors’ prison. His property, however, remained in the family, as his primary creditor was his own cousin, Richard Beckford. See Nelson, Slavery, Geography, and Empire, p. 215, note 66. Nelson relies on Casid, Sowing Empire, p. 9, and Richard B. Sheridan, Slavery and Sugar: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 229. 16 For more on conventions of the pastoral and the picturesque with regard to plantations, see Geoff Quilley, ‘Pastoral Plantations: The Slave Trade and the Representation of the British Colonial Landscape in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (eds), An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture in the Atlantic World, 1660–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 106–128, and Tim Barringer, ‘Picturesque Prospects and the Labor of the Enslaved’, in Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (eds.), Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 41–63. For more information on Beckford of Somerly, see Barringer, ‘Picturesque Prospects’, pp. 42–44, from which the facts in this paragraph are drawn. 17 Quilley, ‘Pastoral Plantations’, p. 109. 18 However, that Robertson represented black people at all should be considered somewhat exceptional given the absence of any mention of slavery in literary texts from the same ‘picturesque’ tradition; see Quilley, ‘Pastoral Plantations’, p. 114. 19 Ibid., p. 115. The Parish of St Thomas-in-the-Vale was popularly known as ‘The Walks’ (Bog Walk, Six-Mile Walk, Sixteen-Mile Walk, etc.). Located just outside of Spanish Town, Sixteen-Mile Walk was, according to the historian Kathleen Wilson, the site of several ‘gentlemen’s seats’ and was popular among the elite planters for its favourable climate and picturesque terrain which included both a spring and a river. See Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 156. 20 Barrigner, ‘Picturesque Prospects’, p. 41. 21 Quilley, ‘Pastoral Plantations’, p. 115. 22 St. James Chronicle, 10–13 May 1777, p. 2; quoted in Quilley, ‘Pastoral Plantations’, p. 114. 23 Quilley, ‘Pastoral Plantations’, p. 115. 24 Ibid., p. 116. 25 Ibid., p. 117. 26 Nelson, Slavery, Geography, and Empire, p. 11. 27 Although most commentators on the painting describe the exchange between the two figures as an act of rustic kindness from the woman to the man, in my view the transaction that takes place here is not entirely clear. The kneeling man’s outstretched hand could just as easily be read as offering the piece of produce to the standing woman, and the basket between them on the ground complicates the viewer’s understanding of the events transpiring even further. Has she, perhaps, just dropped the basket, and he come to her aid? What of the status of the two



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

figures? Given that the painting definitely depicts an actual sugar plantation, the viewer must assume that the rather well-dressed woman is enslaved (though certainly among the more privileged of her fellow bondsfolk); however, what of the man, naked save for a cloth round his waist? Is his dress merely meant to convey the simplicity of the island Eden, or might he be a fugitive to whom the woman offers succour? Barringer entertains this last possibility as well; see Barringer ‘Picturesque Prospects’, p. 48. 28 Ibid., p. 45. 29 Moreover, Brunias’s depiction of dark-skinned Afro-Caribbeans engaged in commercial exchanges contrasts sharply with his scenes of mixed-race women in the marketplace which, as Kriz has observed, put the mulatress’s beauty on display more than they show her participating in market transactions; Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 44. 30 Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); this watershed text changed the historiography of slavery by focusing not on what had been done to black people under slavery, but on what they managed to do and create for themselves despite it. I want to reiterate here that I am entirely cognisant of the very selective slice of Afro-Caribbean life that Brunias’s paintings represent and how they supported plantocratic fanstasies about the nature of slavery. Brunias’s pictures unequivocally elide the reality of field labour, which would have occupied the vast majority of enslaved people’s time, in favour of depicting activities that, for the most part, could only have taken place on Sunday. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who encouraged me to underscore this point. 31 Young, ‘A Tour through the Several Islands of Barbadoes, St. Vincent, Antigua, Tobago, and Grenada’, pp. 247–248, 264. Young’s account, which is not exceptional, demonstrates the extent to which slaveholders believed that enslaved black people genuinely loved and depended upon them. His journal teems with examples such as these that suggest the way in which whites perceived themselves to be at the centre of black existence. 32 As with other Brunias works, this generic title is not original. However, Brunias painted a number of different works that are now known generically as ‘handkerchief dances’ and that feature a similar couple dancing with a handkerchief (see, for example, fig. 33). My research has not yielded information about a specific eighteenth-century dance referred to as the ‘handkerchief dance’ by Europeans, and the dedication accompanying Brunias’s own engraving of a very similar scene describes it simply as a ‘Negroes Dance’ without specific mention of the handkerchief (see fig. 61). Moreover, as the work of Lynne Fauley Emery demonstrates, Westerners often confused black dances with each other or referred to the same dance, such as the bamboula/chica – the dance most likely recorded by Brunias  – by two or more different names. However, the handkerchief or similar piece of material seems to feature prominently in the African diasporic dance tradition, as demonstrated, for example, by the sheer number of ‘handkerchief dances’ that Brunias captured, the prevalence of the two handkerchiefs in Plantation Scene, and the endurance of the handkerchief in dances such as the

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New Orleans ‘second line’. For further reading, see Lynne Fauley Emery, Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970 (Palo Alto, CA: National Press Books, 1972). 33 The couple, dressed all in white, certainly evokes a wedding pair and similar speculations have been made about the painting Plantation Scene and Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Springs, Virginia to which Handkerchief Dance on the Island of Dominica is compared later in this chapter. 34 For a more complete discussion, see Robert Farris Thompson’s essay, ‘Kongo Influences on African-American Artistic Culture’, in Joseph Holloway (ed.), Africanisms in American Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 159–160. 35 Nelson, Slavery, Geography, and Empire, p. 140. 36 Emery, Black Dance, p. 24. 37 Ibid., p. 26. 38 Ibid., p. 25. 39 Ibid. 40 See Mrs. A. C. Carmichael, Five Years in Trinidad and St. Vincent: A View of the Social Condition of the White, Coloured, and Negro Population of the West Indies (London: Whitaker, 1834). 41 Young, ‘A Tour through the Several Islands of Barbadoes, St. Vincent, Antigua, Tobago, and Grenada’, pp. 256, 266. 42 Barringer, ‘Picturesque Prospects’, p. 52. 43 Isaac Mendes Belisario, Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population, in the Island of Jamaica, Drawn from Nature, and in Lithography (1837–38), reprinted in Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-Ruiz (eds), Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, n.p. 44 Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 122; Moreover, as Kriz importantly points out, while Belisario’s black figures conform to types familiar from the European ‘Cries’ traditions, marking them as recognisably ‘English’, it is their African-ness that makes them distinctive and enables them to define white West Indians as more than inferior imitations of metropolitan Britons. 45 See Gillian Forrester, ‘Mapping a New Kingston: Belisario’s Sketches of Character’, in Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-Ruiz (eds), Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, pp. 65–87. 46 Ibid., p. 70. 47 Holly Snyder, ‘Customs of an Unruly Race: The Political Context of Jamaican Jewry, 1670–1831’, in Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-Ruiz (eds), Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, pp. 151–161. 48 In separate essays, Forrester and Kriz demonstrate Belisario’s appropriation of the London ‘Cries’ tradition both to distinguish Kingston as a thriving urban space rather than a backward colonial outpost and to reposition the historical location of Jews within such spaces. The European ‘Cries’ typically represented urban street vendors hawking their services and wares, frequently including Jewish merchants – usually bearded and dressed in black – selling old clothes, trinkets, and the like. Kriz’s essay brilliantly discusses Belisario’s erasure of the Jewish street



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

hawker and surrogation/hybridisation of the black body in Sketches of Character as an ‘advantageous representational strategy in a work whose public included statusconscious, wealthy Jamaican Jews seeking to confirm a cultural identity that was “white” and “elite”’; see Kriz, ‘Belisario’s “Kingston Cries”’, in Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-Ruiz (eds), Slavery and Emancipation in Jamaica, p. 168. Significantly the Jewish body is entirely absent from Belisario’s Sketches of Character; however, the Jewish population of colonial Jamaica is present, included on the subscriber list – complete with honorifics – in a community of elite white planters and colonial officials. Thus, Jamaica’s Jews are included among a ‘white, urbane, cultivated colonial community’ and distinguished from the ‘creole negroes’ whom Belisario images (ibid.). For a fuller discussion of Jews in Jamaica, see also Kriz’s chapter on Belisario, ‘Making a Black Folk: Belisario’s Sketches of Character’, in Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, pp. 117–155, especially pp. 145–153. 49 Belisario produced the series through advance subscription, and the subscriber list published with the premier issue indicates that his clientele was almost exclusively Jamaican. Furthermore, the artist seems to have made no attempt to sell subscriptions abroad or distribute the series in England or anywhere outside Jamaica, and Forrester concludes that the series served to ‘bolster a sense among its inhabitants of Jamaica’s sophistication, rather than to convey it to a metropolitan constituency’; see Forrester, ‘Mapping a New Kingston’, p. 71. In contrast, Brunias sent paintings back to England and produced prints for distribution abroad, suggesting that his works were explicitly intended to serve a didactic function, teaching metropolitan Britons and continental Europeans about the colonial Other. Interestingly and importantly, however, the images of both artists have been used since their creation in a documentary mode as historical and ethnographic illustration and in a way that obscures their selective vision and conscious constructedness. 50 Forrester, ‘Mapping a New Kingston’, p. 65. 51 Forrester finds the work to be ‘a fractured series of overlapping and often contending elements that invite diverse interpretations’, locating the ‘greateast disparity between the predominantly reactionary rhetoric of Belisario’s letterpress and the contrasting radicalism of the visual component of the work’; see Forrester, ‘Mapping a New Kingston’, p. 70. Although I do not entirely disagree with Forrester, I find less of a discrepancy between Belisario’s images and the letterpress than between Brunias’s works and the way in which they are conventionally discussed. 52 Belisario, Sketches of Character, n.p. 53 The issue of black freedom was particularly salient for Clay, as Philadelphia then boasted the largest, wealthiest, and most organised free African American population in the United States. 54 Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 118. 55 Ibid. 56 Belisario, Sketches of Character, n.p. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid.

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59 Kriz also observes the theatrical nature of Belisario’s prints. Her analysis of ‘Koo, Koo, or Actor-Boy’ (fig. 29), which features a crowd on the streets, particularly the description of the curtains that separate M. Q. Henriques’s shop from the street, is particularly convincing in this regard: ‘The slightly parted curtains and arched sign pointedly call up theatrical curtains and a proscenium arch, providing the masked Actor-Boy in his resplendent costume with a backdrop’; see Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 152. 60 My thanks go to Robert Farris Thompson and Cheryl Finley, each of whom offered this observation in separate conversations. 61 This statement does not apply so unproblematically to Brunias’s use of marginal black figures, generally on the edges of busy market scenes such as A Linen Market with a Linen-stall and Vegetable Seller in the West Indies (fig. 14). However, though sometimes vaguely articulated and exiled to the edges or background of the image, these figures do, to some extent, serve as examples of black independence as they are typically depicted as entrepreneurs selling the produce of their provision grounds. 62 Of course, being cognisant of the colonial gaze is a prerequisite for any conscious resistance to it. Charmaine A. Nelson articulates this brilliantly in her formulation of ‘affectation’ – ‘an exaggerated or outlandish performance … that positions the black body as a knowing subject, one that embodied knowledge about the colonizer, as well as a self-conscious body, one that not only understood itself to be under surveillance, but understood the nature of that surveillance’; Nelson, Slavery, Geography, and Empire, p. 142. Although I find this a problematic concept to apply to Belisario’s pictures themselves (because it requires considering the works as documentary rather than constructed images, as well as projecting ideas on to the performers for which there is no historical, visual, or contextual evidence), I absolutely agree that it is critical to consider such possibilities when thinking about the subjectivity and agency of Afro-Caribbean people. 63 Many scholars have identified African influences in this work, including the style of dance, which some trace back to a Yoruba step called the juba, the simple banjo known as a molo, the fabric of the women’s scarves, and, of course, the drum. See, for example, James Oliver Horton and Lois Horton, Slavery and the Making of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 41. 64 My thanks go to Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw for encouraging me to expand my argument relating to communal space and architecture in this chapter. 65 Young, ‘A Tour through the Several Islands of Barbadoes, St. Vincent, Antigua, Tobago, and Grenada’, p. 238. 66 For discussion of Tahro’s house, see Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 61. 67 It is also important to recognise that British planters might have been particularly comfortable with this type of design because the A-frame dwelling with gabled ends and thatched roofs was also popular among the peasantry in mainland Britain. 68 Of course, it was exceptional that Mayr painted these black and brown folk in the same manner as other artists represented whites in genre scenes, as opposed



Merry and contented slaves and other island myths

to the way in which people of African descent were more often portrayed in nineteenth-century American genre painting. For example, although Krimmel and Mount both painted scenes of whites comparable to Mayr’s image of African Americans in Kitchen Ball, both artists also painted denigrating images of blacks (though many of Mount’s, in my view, are more complicated and ambivalent than Krimmel’s). In fact, according to the art historian Guy C. McElroy, in works like Quilting Frolic (1813), Krimmel, aiming to create a light-hearted and humorous scenario, was one of the first painters to use ‘physiognomical distortions as a basic element in the depiction of African-Americans’ and his work ‘profoundly reinforced developing ideas regarding the humorous, “even debased” appearance’ of black people; see Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710–1940 (San Francisco: Bedford Arts/Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990), p. 14. 69 Kenneth Bilby, ‘More than Met the Eye: African-Jamaican Festivities in the Time of Belisario’, in Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-Ruiz (eds), Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, pp. 121–136; emphasis added. 70 As I pointed out in note 22 to the introduction, both Lennox Honychurch and Joan McMurray have speculated that this figure represents Brunias. 71 Hans Sloane quoted in James Delbergo, ‘Slavery in the Cabinet of Curiosities: Hans Sloane’s Atlantic World’, p. 12, www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/delbourgo%20 essay.pdf (accessed 16 May 2017).

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Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana: mixed-race Venuses and Vixens as the fruits of imperial enterprise

Housed in the storage tombs of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography is one of Agostino Brunias’s more fascinating pictures. The intimately scaled painting features four nude women seeking refuge from the steamy heat of the Caribbean, bathing in a shallow stream under the canopy of an abundant tree. In many ways a rather conventional bathing image, this depiction of a ubiquitous theme of Western art by a painter of little renown would not, given this description, seem to be particularly noteworthy. However, the painting possesses a singular difference that makes it of interest to me and that also accounts for its home in a repository typically reserved for objects perceived as artifacts of the so-called Other: Brunias’s bathing beauties have brown skins. What are we to make of this intriguing picture and its bathers whose coloured complexions defy our expectations? A paper tag affixed to the back of Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing (fig. 35) points to its ostensible raison d’être, indicating, in elegant manuscript, that it is one of a set of ‘six Paintings by Brunias, representing the People of different color in some of the Islands in the West Indies’.1 Revealing this diversity of colour in all its naked glory, in this picture Brunias replaces his more quotidian trade scenes and negro ­­dancing frolics with a bathing tableau set against a sylvan Eden. A single word – ‘lush’ – describes both the land with its luxuriant vegetation and the women whose voluptuous bodies exude a sense of organic sensuality. Not coincidentally, the same descriptors so frequently applied by eighteenth-century European travellers to convey the natural wonders of the Caribbean – words such as ‘lush’ and ‘torrid’ – often carry the possibility of a naughtier connotation; ‘succulent flesh’ might just as easily describe the body of a woman as the meat of a coconut. Given a painting with such explicit sexual overtones and racialised power dynamics as this one, few historians of art would deny that the work demonstrates more than merely objective ethnographic interest (indeed, few scholars these days would argue that ethnography is ever objective in the first place). However, given that the documentary authority of Brunias’s



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

Agostino Brunias, Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing, mid-late eighteenth century

work has, heretofore, either been emphasised or tended to go unchallenged, the conspicuous sexual innuendo present in much of the artist’s work, even, I would argue, in seemingly mundane trade scenes, has frequently gone unacknowledged and has yet to be fully explored. For example, considering Brunias’s Mulatress Purchasing Fruit from a Negro Woman* (fig. 24) primarily in light of its documentary qualities, Beth Fowkes Tobin’s description of

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the painting ­­ does not mention that the garment of the somewhat shabbily dressed mulatress falls seductively away from her shoulder to reveal the entirety of her left breast while her left hand clearly fondles her other breast beneath her chemise.2 Considering such provocative details opens up myriad possibilities for interpreting Brunias’s oeuvre. This chapter underscores the

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Agostino Brunias, French Mulatresses of St. Dominica in their Proper Dress, mid-late eighteenth century



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

Agostino Brunias, French Mulatress of St. Dominica and a Negro Woman, mid-late eighteenth century

sexually charged nature of Brunias’s West Indian paintings, probing in particular the pronounced confluence of colonialism and the fetishisation of the mixed-race female body evident in these works. Observing the conspicuous omnipresence of the mulatress in the artist’s Caribbean pictures, I aim to discover why these brown female bodies, who appear in painting after painting, ­­

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made such seemingly perfect canvases upon which to project British colonial desires. Among the few scholars to devote any critical attention to sexuality in Brunias’s work, the Jamaican feminist Patricia Mohammed has commented upon the sexualised implications of the artist’s images. In her essay ‘Gendering the Caribbean Picturesque’, she offers a brief reading of Brunias’s West India Washerwomen (fig. 40) in which she attributes this quality of the artist’s work to the ‘new sexual freedoms which the European scripts of primitivism have deemed fitting of this region’.3 However, Mohammed also alludes to the documentary authority of the artist’s work in contrast to the ‘imaginary or reported scenes executed by sailors, explorers, artists, tradesmen, planters, and government officials in Europe’, and specifically distinguishes Brunias as ‘the first European painter in the region that we know of to have painted in front of the subject, in the islands’.4 Thus, she only implicitly recognises the constructedness of the Caribbean ‘reality’ that Brunias presents or its investment in colonial fantasy. Kay Dian Kriz’s investigations of Brunias’s ‘marketing mulatresses’ also provide an important exception to the tendency to take his work at face value, thus obscuring its sexual implications. Kriz has argued that, within the context of the ‘primitive’ connotations associated with female bodies of colour and the compromised state of white female identity in the islands, the mulatress emerged as Brunias’s representative West Indian body by default. Kriz notes that the fundamental ‘in-betweenness’ of this figure allowed her to signify the potential refinement of these Caribbean colonial outposts under development while de-emphasising the colonies’ base associations with conspicuous luxury, pleasure, and amoral profit. Offering a subtle but significant revision, I argue that the mulatress, even more multivalent than Kriz acknowledges, represented both the potential for developing a refined British civilisation in the Caribbean colonies and the illicit pleasures and profits to be had there.5 Although early British chroniclers of colonial Caribbean life such as Richard Ligon often professed to be physically repulsed by the African and Afro-Creole women they encountered, this opinion was by no means universally held, and it clearly did not dictate white men’s sexual conduct in the West Indian colonies. Slavery informed all relations of power in the colonial Caribbean including sexuality, and interracial sexual activity – particularly between white men and black or mixed-race women – constituted an inescapable hallmark of colonial Caribbean life. Slave society allowed white men effectively unrestricted access to the bodies of women of African descent – access that they enjoyed with virtual impunity. Indeed, Trevor Burnard suggests that ‘white sexual access to black or colored women appears to have been a principal reason why white men moved to Jamaica’, an observation that might be extrapolated to the British Caribbean more generally.6



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

Period texts such as the letters of Simon Taylor, a wealthy Jamaican sugar planter, and the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, an overseer-turned-planter who arrived in Jamaica as a 29-year-old bachelor and made the island his home until his death in 1786, shed important light on the nature of interracial sexual activity in the West Indies and the circumstances and contexts in which it occurred. While Christer Petley’s analysis of the letters that Taylor sent home to England demonstrates Creole anxieties about how their sexual relationships with women of colour would be perceived in Britain, Thistlewood’s diaries indicate the extent to which white men in the West Indies enjoyed their sexual access to black and mixed-race women’s bodies with little sanction from their fellow colonists, and the accounts of both men suggest that white men’s sexual involvement with women of African descent  was an expected rather than an exceptional feature of Caribbean colonial life.7 Thistlewood’s diary can be described as unique – both for the meticulous detail with which he recounts his sexual exploits and the thirty-eight-year span of time it chronicles, with seldom a day missed. However, the challenge of Thistlewood’s account lies less in the question of the representativeness of the activities it presents (nothing suggests they were atypical) and more in its lack of balance, as Thistlewood presents a dispassionate chronicle of events with little emotional content or introspection.8 While trying to recover the experience of enslaved and otherwise oppressed women of colour from the records left by those who enslaved and/or oppressed them is an inevitably problematic enterprise, Thistlewood’s lack of introspection – providing not even his interpretation of the women’s understanding of or feelings about these encounters – brings into vivid relief the conspicuous absence of these largely unrecoverable voices. Nonetheless, texts such as Thistlewood’s can illuminate the significance of interracial sex as a representation of raced and gendered colonial power dynamics. These sources reveal that white men sought out women of African descent  – most often enslaved but also free – for a variety of reasons, for both casual sexual release and for long-term companionship, and the same man might be involved in both kinds of sexual activity simultaneously. For example, Thistlewood recorded sexual involvement with 109 different women during his tenure in Jamaica; however, well over half of these were one-time encounters, and only in eighteen cases did Thistlewood seek out the same partner more than ten times.9 Moreover, in addition to this more casual sexual activity, Thistlewood maintained relationships with three ‘housekeepers’, the polite term used by Jamaican colonists to describe the black and mixed-race women who served as long-term and primary partners to white men, during his time in Jamaica. While his relationships with Marina and Jenny were relatively short-lived, Thistlewood’s involvement with Phibbah

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endured for over three decades, and he left instructions in his will for her purchase and manumission by his estate.10 Although interracial sex between white men and black or mixed-race women could, in some cases, have some foundation in mutual attraction or emotional attachment, the dramatic disparity in power between the parties in the colonial context makes it difficult to characterise such relationships as truly consensual. Consent implies the possibility of its opposite, refusal, and refusing a white man was simply not an option for the vast majority of women of African descent in the West Indies. The threat of violence, if not always explicit, was perpetually implicit, and the possibility of resistance virtually non-existent. Commenting on Thistlewood’s diary, Burnard observes the near impossibility of discerning which sexual encounters occurred out of mutual interest, which were unequivocal cases of rape, which might have been accepted as an alternative to other forms of punishment, which might have been regarded as a ‘disagreeable duty they were expected to provide for white supervisors’, and which might have been entered into in a calculated effort to reap ‘tangible benefits’; ultimately, following the scholarship of Orlando Patterson, Burnard finds the point moot, and I agree. The vastly unequal relations of power between white men and women of African descent renders true consent a ‘fanciful’ concept in the colonial Caribbean context, and, indeed, some critics would characterise any sexual encounter between a white man and a black or mixed-race woman within the context of slavery as a form of rape.11 White settlers in the West Indies certainly did not see it that way, however. While moralists such as Edward Long and Lady Maria Nugent decried white men’s sexual involvement with women of colour as distasteful and perhaps deleterious, the practice seems to have been regarded as an inevitable reality of Caribbean colonial life for which white men were, conveniently, not necessarily entirely responsible. Divided into two parts, this chapter analyses two prominent eighteenth-century constructions of mixed-race female sexuality evident in Brunias’s West Indian pictures: the Venus and the Vixen. While the mixed-race Venus embodied the wild, natural beauty of the tropics, an innocent nymph whose native sensuality, like the islands’ fecund land, is uncultivated and irresistible, her counterpart the Vixen intentionally cultivates and capitalises upon her feminine charms to attract the attention of white male partners. In both cases, Brunias’s images posit provocative visual analogies between Caribbean female bodies and the botanical produce of the Caribbean land that feature in fantasies of the colonial relationship. While the Venus, emblematic of corporeal pleasure, appealed to fantasies of British penetration into the virgin terrain of the West Indies, the Vixen, associated with both cultivation and profit, correlated with the goals of the colonialist project, that is, the refinement of the gifts of nature into a profitable finished product.12



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

My discussion of the mixed-race Venus in this chapter and the relationship of Brunias’s bathers in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing to  the  ­­ classical myth of Actaeon and Diana also aims to showcase Brunias’s  conceptual inventiveness.13 In spite of the association of the artist’s work with traditions of natural history or ethnography, suggesting the images as visual  transcriptions of reality ‘drawn from life’,14 Brunias’s adaptation of so-called ‘Old Master’ precedents to fit the colonial context indicates that his paintings  must be understood as fabricated representations of colonial fantasy filtered through a particularly selective vision and meant to appeal to planters and potential settlers. Working under the guise of his assignment to produce objective visual chronicles of Caribbean life, the painter capitalised on his formal training, his knowledge of canonical European art and literature, and his innate creativity, nimbly adapting familiar Western iconography and themes from Old Master paintings to reflect the particular raced and  gendered dynamics of the colonial West Indies. Similarly, demonstrating this same sort of conceptual creativity on a somewhat more modest scale, Brunias’s brown Vixen paintings reinvent popular contemporary trends in British visual culture such as the ‘Cries’ tradition and fashion plates to suit the colonial context.15 Both examples showcase Brunias’s training, ingenuity, and the sharp sense of witty observation with which he wielded his brush. On bounty and brown beauty, feminine and terrestrial

Perpetuated in a diverse array of sources including travel narratives, natural history texts, and poetry, the identification of the so-called ‘torrid zones’ with prelapsarian abundance flourished in eighteenth-century British culture. The most reprinted poem of the eighteenth century, James Thomson’s epic The Seasons, for example, extols the ‘wonders of the torrid zone’ with its ‘Majestic woods, of every vigorous green’, ‘boundless deep immensity of shade’, and ‘Unnumber’d fruits of keen delicious taste’. The notion that the tropics constituted a paradise of uncultivated abundance was, as Tobin astutely observes ‘firmly planted … in the mind of nearly every eighteenth-century gentleman by the countless travel narratives and natural histories describing tropical regions of the West Indies and by English Georgic poetry’.16 In her analysis of the poetry of Thomson, Alexander Pope, and John Gay, Tobin notes the frequent references to tropical lands as Arcadias, suggesting them as Edenic lands ‘where agricultural abundance is produced without labor’.17 Of course, imagining the West Indies as island Arcadias conveniently excised the reality of slave labour from Britons’ idealised fantasies of the Caribbean. However, thinking of the islands in this way also constructed a particular role for eager would-be colonists, as these lands, teeming with luscious fruits of exotic

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variety just waiting for harvest, required precisely the type of disciplined ­­management that the British colonial project could provide in order to transform their providential surplus into productive supply. Moreover, mastery of this abundance – much like mastery over the bodies who, though unacknowledged, worked to produce it – emerged as a definitive feature of the way that Britons imagined their relationship to the rest of world and to the construction of a British colonial identity.18 Like the poems Tobin elucidates, Brunias’s paintings also depict the legendary lushness of the Caribbean landscape as resulting from the munificence of heaven as opposed to the forced labour of enslaved people of African descent. However, as discussed in the previous chapter, in contrast to these poetic works and their visual culture counterparts as exemplified by the picturesque works of George Robertson, Brunias’s pictures rarely showcase the natural world of the Caribbean as the focus of the work in its own right. Instead, the Caribbean landscapes Brunias created more frequently serve as the backdrops for episodes of social or commercial exchange that suggest the nascent refinement of a world fit for fine Britons. However, through visual analogies posited between female bodies and terrestrial ones, these works often advertise a different kind of bounty – one of brown-skinned beauty – also available for British consumption. Reinventing Venus: the mulatto Venus as quintessential body of the colonised colonial Caribbean

Mobilising the West Indies’ reputation for natural abundance, in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing Brunias offers the viewer not one but three mixedrace lovelies, as well as a bathing negress, thus representing the Caribbean as a place where every colonist might take his pick of any number of women of colour – all teeming with organic sensuality to satisfy his taste for otherwise forbidden fruit. In this picture, Brunias revises traditions of the Venus, both fair and dark, and considering his paintings in light of these traditions reveals how the artist reinvents the Venus trope specifically for the British Caribbean colonial context. With a cascade of strawberry blond locks underscoring the graceful S-curve of her alabaster nude form, Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, certainly the most iconic visual representation of the Roman goddess of love and beauty, exemplifies conventional Western standards of feminine loveliness. But what happens when Venus, synonymous with love and beauty, acquires a racialised modifier? How could Venus be imagined in the colonial Caribbean? The Caribbean historian Barbara Bush identifies the ‘Sable Venus’ as ‘one of the most powerful eighteenth-century constructs of African womanhood’.19 However, racially transforming Venus altered more than just her



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

skin  colour. As the scholarship of Charmaine A. Nelson astutely observes, ‘any shift in the racial location of any-body provokes new readings and meanings for the sex and gender identification of that body’.20 Simply put, the Sable Venus was not merely the epitome of feminine beauty rendered in blackface; instead, the figure prompted altogether different associations from her fair counterpart. Bush, considering the Sable Venus in relation to the ‘She-Devil’ and the ‘Drudge’, two other constructions of black womanhood popular in the West Indian colonial imagination, emphasises how all three types, much like Brunias’s paintings, represent constructions of black female identity crafted by colonists in ways that ‘essentially reflected their needs, economic or sexual’.21 She specifically characterises the Venus as a reflection of ‘white male obsessions with sexual otherness and exoticism’.22 A counterpoint to the decidedly un-feminine, sexually undesirable black ‘drudge’, the figure of the Sable Venus popularly circulated throughout the Atlantic world. Bryan Edwards, for example, chose two iconic treatments of the Sable Venus, Isaac Teale’s The Sable Venus: An Ode and a print of Thomas Stothard’s 1793 painting The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies (fig. 38) (now lost and known only through William Grainger’s engraving), to supplement his 1796 tome The history, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies, an unequivocally colonialist, pro-slavery examination of British involvement in the islands. Moreover, confirming the relationship of Brunias’s work to these others that served the British colonial project, it should be remembered that several engravings after Brunias illustrated editions of Edwards’s book as well. Teale’s poem, a paean to his ‘sable queen of love’, reverses the gendered and raced dynamics of power under slavery and colonialism, casting the black paramour as a powerful sovereign to whose charms he, the white lover, must subject himself: O Sable Queen! Thy mild Domain I seek and court thy gentle reign So soothing, soft and sweet. Where meeting love, sincere delight Fond pleasures, ready joys invite, And unbrought raptures meet.23

Teale’s Ode in no way represented Western literature’s first poetic celebration of interracial love. For example, the Italian poet Giambattista Marino, master of the poetic conceit, preceded Teale in this regard by almost 150 years. Marino’s sonnet ‘Bella schiava’ (‘The Beautiful Slave Girl’) prefigured Teale’s theme of the master becoming the slave to the bondswoman’s charms: ‘A slave to her, my slave, come I, heart twined/ about with tawny cords: her tribute, quite;/ nor white be hands that would this heart unbind.’24 Moreover,

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38

William Grainger after Thomas Stothard, The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies, 1801

several seventeenth-century British poets took up the theme of interracial romance, and their verses probably provided inspiration for Teale’s own.25 As in Teale’s poem, Thomas Stothard’s illustration of the Sable Venus replaces a horrific reality with a romantic idealisation, re-envisioning the Middle Passage as the birth of an African Venus on American shores. As



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

Marcus Wood observes, ‘The rape of slave women is reconstructed in terms of a triumph of the slave Venus over the slave owners and traders who are ironically portrayed as her powerless victims … the slave ship is transformed into a beautiful scallop shell pulled by frolicking dolphins.’26 Like Botticelli’s fair Venus, Stothard’s sable one emerges from a chariot fashioned like a seashell. Her hands grasp the reins of two sea creatures who pull the aquatic vehicle from her African homeland to her new domain in the Americas. A host of putti surround the black Venus, shielding her with a canopy of ostrich plumes and fanning her against the tropical heat. A British flag-waving Poseidon, his eyes raised to the ebony goddess, also presides over the Sable Venus’s transatlantic journey; his Union Jack references the colonial power behind her voyage while his besottedness with the black queen denies the reality of that power.27 Enveloped not only by the shell itself but by the circle of white figures around her, she is the black pearl of this oyster.28 Although metal bands around her wrists and ankles signify the Venus’s enslaved status, Stothard imagines every white-faced figure in the composition as beholden to her. In stark contrast to the brutal realities of rape and sexual abuse that black women endured during the Middle Passage and New World slavery, Stothard’s image suggests that the potent sexual charms of women of colour might be used to dominate white men. This common perception – that women of African descent could hold some power over white men – relieved colonists from any responsibility for their behaviour and informed the development of both the Venus and Vixen tropes.29 While, as will be discussed, the Vixen represented the conscious wielding of this power by women of colour, the Venus’s erotic power was uncultivated, as natural and organic – and therefore as inevitable – as the botanical bounty of the tropics. Like a trio of Eves before the Fall, the brown beauties in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing unabashedly lay their bodies bare, each figure posed and positioned in a different way so as to display the female form from a variety of perspectives. This strategy, borrowed from artistic traditions of the nude like that of the Three Graces, allowed for a more balanced and elegant composition and, importantly, left little to the imagination of the viewer. A verdant landscape of tall grasses and leafy foliage painted in an array of rich greens ranging from emerald to forest dominates the painting, extending to three of the four corners and conveying, along with the bountiful shade tree, the fecundity of the land. The inclusion of a sliver of land in the foreground emphasises the bather’s encapsulation by nature, closing off the space to create the sense of a cosy interior despite the outdoor setting. Indeed, the women themselves appear to rise organically from the landscape, particularly the reclining mulatress and the crouching negress – their bodies sunk low in the water as if rooted in the sandy bottom of the shallow stream. Given the depiction of four nude figures, the presence of only a single discarded dress

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underscores this notion, as if the women, themselves the lush fruit of the New World, have emerged au naturel from the land. Moreover, the red and white stripes that bleed to pink, along with the shape of the cast-off clothing, recall a conch shell, highlighting the bathers’ connection to the natural environment and subtly suggesting them as Venuses, native fruits born of this shallow surrogate for the Caribbean Sea. In the figuring of the dress as a shell and the depiction of the women arising from the water, Brunias alludes to iconic Venus imagery. However, the artist also revises the goddess’s conventional iconography in significant ways in order to reflect the experiences of colonialism and enslavement that informed the milieu in which he painted and the sanitised vision of that situation that his work was meant to project. Both Botticelli’s fair Venus and Stothard’s sable one are depicted in transit, riding their aquatic chariots across the sea from one place to the next. Not firmly rooted in any concrete geography, Botticelli’s Venus simply emerges from the sea without a specific sense of the place from whence she came or where her travels will take her. While the journey of Stothard’s Sable Venus has a clear point of origin and place of disembarkation – Angola and the Americas, respectively – neither her homeland nor her ultimate destination are represented in the image. Consequently, Stothard’s Sable Venus becomes more closely identified with the passage itself than the land at either end of the crossing. In other words, both the white Venus and the black one are associated more with the water from which they seem to magically appear than with any particular terrestrial location, and neither has a clear connection to a physical landscape. Brunias’s mixed-race Venuses, however, are explicitly connected to the Caribbean land, depicted as the products of a very specific geographic location. Rather than being placed in the midst of a grand voyage, blown by ­­gracious winds or pulled by frolicking sea animals while surrounded by open sea and sky, the brown Venuses in Brunias’s picture are firmly planted in their terrestrial environment, and the water’s inability to conceal their bodies underscores the shallowness of the stream that has no depths from which they may be born. Moreover, the distant view of the Caribbean Sea in the background also emphasises the inland location of the women and their connection to the land. They haven’t come from anywhere, nor are they going anywhere; they are, quite explicitly and inextricably, of the land. In connecting the mixed-race Venuses to the land in this way, Brunias’s painting emphasises their particular Caribbean-ness, constructing them as apparent indigenes to the West Indian landscape and pointing to the mixed-race figure as a quintessentially colonial island body. Where the Caribs represent an indigenous Caribbean presence, the mulatress embodies a specifically colonial Caribbean-ness, one that can only come about through the meeting of European and African – the merger of white



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

and black bodies – that resulted from the colonial encounter. With this assertion, I echo and expand upon Patricia Mohammed’s observation in a brief discussion of another Brunias painting that ‘This Venus is no longer white or black. She is olive skinned, mulatto … the hybridity of the mulatto Venus … in this painter’s eyes [signals] the hybridity of the region which his paintings had in my view begun to illustrate.’30 The particular Caribbean-ness of these brown Venuses – highlighted by Brunias’s depiction of them as rising organically from the tropical landscape – results in a visual analogy that relates the women to the land itself, suggesting their brown bodies, ripe with organic sexuality, as another type of exotic fruit indicative of the variety and bounty to be enjoyed in the colonised islands. Moreover, peeking through the dark, shadowy area created by the boughs of the tree, the white face of a peeping Tom hidden in the branches underscores that such tantalising fruits exist for his pleasure. Born to sin: colonial fantasies of the uncultivated sexuality of mixed-race beauties

Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing is unusual in Brunias’s oeuvre for its explicit depiction of sexuality unequivocally meant to titillate the viewer. However, Brunias does not depict the women as aggressively or crudely sexual. On the contrary, their unabashed nakedness, coupled with their ignorance of the voyeur’s presence, suggests their own innocence, much like Adam and Eve’s before they gained knowledge of sin. Moreover, this innocence can be directly related to the Edenic landscape as their untutored sensuality parallels the uncultivated bounty of the Caribbean paradise with which their bodies are identified. The legendary sexual allure of mixed-race women dominated colonialist fantasy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Brunias’s depiction of the nymph-like bathers in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing prefigures literary representations of mixed-race beauties as teeming with sexual appeal, often despite their desire to remain virtuous and chaste. Such treatments represent the sensual nature of mixed-race women as innate, the inevitable result of the transgressive circumstances of their birth; their bodies are born to sin because, originating in the illicit merger of black and white flesh that resulted from the colonial encounter, they are born of sin. In literature, as in Brunias’s paintings, the natural sensuality of these figures is metaphorically related to the lush natural beauty of the Caribbean. Theodor Storm’s novella ‘From Beyond the Seas’ (1863) provides a prime example in the character of Jenny, the daughter of a German plantation owner and his mixed-race concubine in St Croix. While she is still a young girl, Jenny’s father dispatches her to Europe to live with relatives and obtain a proper education. Because her body bears few traces of her African heritage,

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Jenny’s European family welcomes her, and she lives her life much as though she were uncomplicatedly a white woman. However, while her mixed-race ancestry might not be easily discernible at first sight, observation reveals that the girl possesses that irresistible appeal and native sensuality associated with her racial background. As her cousin and love interest Alfred remarks: one just had to see how she then threw back her head with her rich shining hair and how easily and quickly those supple hips followed the turn of her beautiful head. I could not take my eyes from her; in these strong, yet graceful movements there was something that was truly suggestive of the wilderness primeval.31

Alfred identifies Jenny’s organic sensuality and captivating beauty with a primeval wilderness reminiscent of the lush, prelapsarian backdrop Brunias designs for his brown Venuses. Furthermore, the text repeatedly and explicitly connects these qualities in Jenny to her mixed-race heritage and her Caribbean origins. When Alfred proposes to Jenny, she protests, ‘I know that we’re [mixed-race women] beautiful … seductively beautiful, like sin, which is our origin. But, Alfred, – I won’t seduce you.’ Jenny’s protest declaring her refusal to seduce Alfred at once acknowledges the genesis of the potential power she wields over him while signalling her surrender of that power; thus, the white male Alfred becomes the master of this mixed-race Venus’s destiny. Interestingly, Storm’s text, like Brunias’s painting, explicitly suggests its mixed-race protagonist as a bathing Venus.32 In a critical scene, Alfred comes upon a pond featuring a marble Venus statue rising from the water: It was obviously one of the loveliest statues from the period of Louis XV. She stretched out one bare foot just above the water as if to step into the pool; one hand rested on a rock, while the other held her garment, which had already been loosened, together over her breast. From this vantage point I couldn’t see her face, for her head was turned as if she wanted to make sure there were no unbidden observers before she entrusted her unclothed body to the waves.33

Later, Alfred attempts to re-visit the sculpture and initially finds it gone. Scanning the horizon, he sees ‘the white figure of a woman’ on the opposite bank and wonders, ‘Were the ancient gods walking abroad?’ As he approaches, he discerns ‘Jenny’s beautiful pale face … brilliantly lit by the moon’ and tells her, ‘I thought … that it was the goddess who had stepped off her pedestal.’34 Both Brunias’s painting and Storm’s text present the mulatress’s allure as innate and inescapable. Jenny, who is indeed a paragon of feminine virtue, wants desperately to distance herself from the seductive beauty that she inevitably possesses, and, in a scene that also resonates both with Brunias’s painting and with the myth of Actaeon and Diana (discussed below), Jenny merits comparison to the Venus sculpture who is reluctant to drop her robe for fear



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

that the beauty of her naked body might be glimpsed by an uninvited voyeur. However, despite Alfred’s heartfelt feelings, he is inevitably attracted to Jenny’s inexorable sensuality, to what he describes as her ‘beautiful deviltry’.35 Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing presents in triplicate precisely the tableau that Storm’s Jenny feared, and the natural sex appeal that Brunias’s brown Venuses exude is rendered all the more titillating by their ignorance of the voyeur’s presence. While the brown Venuses in Brunias’s painting, unaware of the peeper’s intrusion into their private Eden, do not voluntarily relinquish the potential power stemming from their innate seductiveness as Jenny arguably does, the display of female flesh before the viewer’s eyes suggests a willingness to be consumed. This, when considered in light of the bathers’ identification with the Caribbean land itself, epitomises the ultimate colonial fantasy of lush bodies and lush lands, overripe and waiting to be ­­subject to British mastery. Caribbean Venus in a New World harem: bringing Orientalist visual tropes to the Americas

For colonial Britons, the Caribbean potentially served the same function that Edward Said attributes to the Orient in the Western popular ­imagination – an exotic Other-land on to which Western fantasies can be projected.36 Eighteenth-century Europeans held dual fascinations with the Old World of the East and the New World of the West; both lands were coded as exotic in the European popular imagination and Europeans associated both locales with many of the same attributes, including luxuriant decadence, laziness, ‘depraved’ sexual practices including polygamy and concubinage, and – the arguable cause of all of these – unfathomable heat. Ideologically and pictorially, Brunias’s brown Venus paintings such as Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing resemble Orientalist harem pictures, a type of art more closely identified with the nineteenth century but with strong precursors in the 1700s.37 In addition to the obviously similar visual language, including multiple nude women, the association with bathing, and the voyeuristic presence implied by the artist’s vision, like many Orientalist works, Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing – with its primordial landscapes and nude bodies – tends to deny any ‘sense of history, of temporal change’, presenting a pristine tableau upon which the intended white male viewers could project their most fantastic desires.38 Orientalist paintings featuring women typically depict the harem or the harem’s inextricably related site of origin, the slave market, and both locations obviously had resonances in the colonial West Indies. No doubt, the headwraps of the lovely ‘French’ mulatresses reminded Brunias of the turbans worn by Oriental figures in European painting, and the harem provided a

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ready model for constructing a visual discourse engaging race, gender, and power that could be easily adapted to the colonial Caribbean. Furthermore, the harem’s association with interracial sexuality and with slavery added to its appropriateness as a visual idiom for representing the colonial West Indies. Arguably the prototypical location of interracial sexuality in Western visual and literary culture, whether in the form of lustful Turks preying on fair Greek maidens, strapping African slaves usurping the master’s position for illicit trysts with his wives, or black attendants helping to prepare resplendent odalisques for service in the sultan’s bed, the intimate proximity of dark flesh and light has, since its inception, significantly defined the harem in the Western mind.39 Like harem pictures, Brunias’s brown Venus works present interracial scenes infused with a sense of voyeuristic privilege in which the presumed white, heterosexual male viewer sees something that he knows he should not see but that, ironically, is staged expressly for his gaze. Linda Nochlin identifies this privileged gaze in her germinal essay ‘The Imaginary Orient’, observing that the ‘white man, the Westerner, is of course always implicitly present in Orientalist paintings … his is necessarily the controlling gaze, the gaze which brings the Oriental world into being, the gaze for which it is ultimately intended’.40 The presence of the white male gaze, though almost always explicitly absent (i.e. not depicted) in Orientalist works, is overwhelmingly implied. In Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s iconic Turkish Bath (1862), the circular shape of the picture, mimicking a peephole, underscores the implied presence of the European male voyeur. However, in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing, Brunias makes explicit the voyeuristic privilege only implied in the nineteenth-century Orientalist works of Gérôme, Delacroix, and Ingres. Emphasising the act of voyeurism, the circular clearing of brush around the voyeur’s pale visage accomplishes a function similar to the round frame in which Ingres showcases his collection of harem girls, and makes the peeping Tom’s presence explicit. Brunias’s painting also shares with harem pictures precisely this notion of a collection of captive women, cloistered together for the sexual pleasure of their keeper, or, in this case, the voyeur. While denotatively the harem might have simply referred to the cosseted women kept as wives and concubines by an Oriental patriarch, connotatively, especially in terms of visual culture, the  harem signified a diverse collection of women, representing various ethnic backgrounds and distinguished by a variety of hues. This fact amplifies the titillating nature of the pictures, for, as Nochlin observes and as both Emily Apter and Reina Lewis have each further interrogated, in harem pictures ‘the conjunction of black and white, or dark and light female bodies … has traditionally signified lesbianism’.41 In addition to representing the abundance of the New World, the four bathers in Mulatresses and Negro Woman



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

Bathing represent just such a diverse array of feminine loveliness, displayed in a sapphically tinged scene for the pleasure of both voyeur and viewer – who are, of course, inextricably connected through the visual dynamics of the painting, as the viewer, regarding the painting as a mirror, imagines himself as the voyeur.42 Gathered in a loosely configured circle, three creamy-coloured bodies surround one dark one, presenting the female figure from all sides and in a number of positions – crouching, standing, sitting, and reclining. Furthermore, despite the assigned title of the picture which invites a comparison between only two ‘types’ of women – the mulatress and the negress – the women’s bodies reveal subtle variations in hue that correspond to a microhierarchy of colour in which the black woman represents the point of origin in a progressively paler clockwise circle of flesh that advances towards whiteness. Compositionally, then, Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing might be understood as a reversal of Jean-Marc Nattier’s Mademoiselle de Clermont en Sultane of 1733 (fig. 39), in which the startlingly white Mademoiselle de Clermont, attired before her bath in an ermine-trimmed red robe and a flimsy white dressing gown hitched up above the knee to provide a risqué revelation of her ivory legs, is the pale axis that centres a circle of black figures. The gendered dynamics of this painting are also at odds with Brunias’s bathing picture, as Nattier depicts du Clermont, a white woman, as the sultana who presides over a harem-like stable comprised predominantly of black boys. However, the two images are ideological twins with regard to race and power, as the black boys cater to their sultana much as the voyeur/viewer imagines the brown Venuses will be at his service. Moreover, while the women in the painting may or may not have been anyone’s legal property, Brunias’s use of harem imagery asserts that white men have certain rights over black and brown female bodies. In a study of images of the recumbent Venus in early America, Caroline Winterer notes that the word odalisque, commonly used to refer to recumbent female nudes – almost always, I would add, in Oriental settings – entered the English language in the 1600s, meaning ‘slave’ or ‘concubine’, an etymology that ‘illuminates the overlapping categories of woman and slave’.43 While Winterer, emphasising the intersection of woman and slave, uses the word’s etymology to point to the oppression of both black and white women under patriarchy, considering the colonial West Indian context of Brunias’s work, I would highlight the term’s original connotation, which brought together the notions of concubinage, already presumed to be gendered feminine, and slavery, which, in the Anglo-American world, was obviously raced. Brunias’s myriad visual references to the harem – in works such Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing (especially with its recumbent Caribbean odalisque) and West India Washerwomen (fig.  40) – captures this intersection of concubinage and

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Jean-Marc Nattier, Mademoiselle de Clermont en Sultane, 1733

slavery, ­­suggesting the brown beauties they feature as potential pleasure playmates – sexual servants who might come willingly but who could, as the peeper’s uninvited gawking implies, be taken without permission. Colonising Diana: iconographic roots and ideological revisions in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing

Brunias clearly presents the mixed-race woman as the quintessential Venus of the colonial Caribbean; however, examining Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing in light of another tradition from antiquity reinforces the relationship between the artist’s images of the brown Venus and colonialist ideology. In addition to the obvious references to Venus imagery, Brunias also employs the Roman myth of Actaeon and Diana as an iconographic and ideological model for the painting. It makes sense that Brunias would consider Diana an apt model for his American Venuses. Artists’ renderings of the Roman goddess – perpetually virginal sovereign of forests and wilderness  ­­ –  ­­conventionally



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

Agostino Brunias, West India Washerwomen, c. 1779

depict her as a scantily clad huntress armed with a bow and arrow. Thus Diana’s iconography neatly aligns with allegorical representations of America as a female figure nearly naked, similarly armed, and surrounded by a lush wooded landscape, a fact that makes sense considering the perception of the Americas as virgin wilderness, precisely the sort of territory over which Diana reigned. To compose the colonial fantasy he depicts in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing, Brunias borrowed both directly and indirectly from ­­several

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precedent images of the myth of Actaeon stumbling upon the goddess Diana bathing in a forest stream with her attendant nymphs. In this Roman tale, Actaeon, while wandering through the woods on a hunting expedition, accidentally happens upon Diana with her bathing party. Despite his lack of intention, the goddess’s beauty – much like the irresistible, organic sensuality attributed to the mixed-race Venus – blinds him to the folly of his continued gawking, and the accidental voyeur cannot tear his eyes away. Diana’s companions soon notice his trespass upon their intimate activities. As they attempt to shield their beloved goddess from view, an outraged Diana summons her divine powers to transform Actaeon into a deer which is then devoured by his own hunting dogs. The myth appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and, as Ovid’s work enjoyed particular popularity in eighteenth-century England, it is reasonable to assume that Brunias would have known the story and been familiar with some of the many visual images inspired by it.44 Careful analysis of the painting reveals that Brunias applied and altered details from the Actaeon and Diana tradition in order to compose a constructed fantasy of colonial West Indian life. Comparing Brunias’s painting to previous visual renditions of the myth demonstrates how astutely he tailored these visual models to construct the image of colonial West Indian life that he aimed to project. For example, Brunias adapts features of Actaeon and Diana images to bring to the fore the gendered implications of racial difference, both between the voyeur and the women and the mulatresses and the negress. Compositionally, Brunias’s painting has much in common with Giuseppe Cesari’s 1603 Diana and Actaeon (fig. 41). Both works feature a diagonally oriented stream whose shallowness is ­­accentuated by the bodies and stones in the water as well as a tall landscape feature on the left side of the painting contrasted with a single open patch of sky in the upper-right corner. Cesari’s rendering of the myth also features a seated figure (in this case, Diana) who rests atop a boulder draped with white fabric. Although Cesari paints this figure with her back to the viewer, the white drapery over the figure’s stony throne, coupled with the position of her knees as she dips the toes of only one foot in the water, suggests that she may have been a formal inspiration for the pose of the central mulatress in Brunias’s painting.45 Whereas the pure white beauty of Cesari’s Diana is underscored by the play of white fabric upon bare white skin – a common trick employed by artists wishing to highlight the fairness of their subjects – the whiteness of the drapery atop which Brunias’s central mulatress perches, like the other white fabric in various guises placed in proximity to the other two darker figures in the composition, has the opposite effect. Instead of highlighting the figures’ fairness and purity, these swatches emphasise the non-whiteness of flesh that,



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

Giuseppe Cesari (Cavalier d’Arpino), Diana and Actaeon, 1603

without the contrast, might be mistaken for white. The disparity between the milky white of the fabric and the vanilla cream of the mulatress’s skin calls attention to her mixed racial ancestry, bringing up the related connotations regarding her sexuality and marking her body as one over which the white voyeur can claim control. The long, graceful body of this figure and that of the slightly darker companion with whom she converses, both openly on display, unequivocally posit them as objects for erotic contemplation and underscore the peeper’s power over them. But what might the viewer make of the dark chocolate body of the black woman who crouches between them? In contrast to the accessible bodies of the mulatresses, the black woman, though unclothed, closes herself off from the viewer and, significantly, is almost entirely unavailable to the peeping Tom, who would be privy only to her back. Through two different figures – the black attendant who labours to hide Diana from Actaeon’s prying eyes and the nymph huddled next to the pillar who coyly closes in upon herself to shield her own body from the interloper’s view – Titian’s 1559 Diana Surprised by Actaeon (fig. 42) offers precedent for both the black woman’s presence in such a bathing scene and for her unusual posture, which also echoes the modest Venus pose of antiquity. The figure’s awkward squatting pose can be  read as alluding to both the physical labour for which bodies

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like hers were typically reserved and the labour of childbirth which both perpetuated the West Indian plantation economy and, in cases of mixedrace progeny, began the cyclical progression towards whiteness manifest in Brunias’s painting. While the mulatresses are all roundness and curves, the black woman’s body is a contortion of awkward angles. Her arms attempt to restrict her body entirely from view as her right hand extends to the space between her legs, as if to hide or close off her sex – view of which is already blocked by the angle of her bent right leg – and she crosses her left arm upwards to cover her left breast. The posture conveys a double sense of awkwardness; the pose itself is contorted and unnatural and this, especially when contrasted with the open, long, and languid bodies of the mulatresses, amplifies the sense of the figure’s general out-of-placeness in this moment of laziness and leisure. Brunias clearly presents the black woman in opposition to the mulatresses as the less desirable lover. As if to obfuscate the origin of the progressively ­­

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Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Diana Surprised by Actaeon, 1559



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

paler circle of flesh that the artist represents, the crouching negress is denied the status of potential pleasure playmate accorded the two turbaned ­­mulatresses who bookend her dark body like quotation marks. In contrast to the sense of feminine beauty and organic sensuality personified by the three other bathers, Brunias’s black bather is barely acknowledged as a woman. Unlike the beautiful dark-skinned women that the artist painted elsewhere, Brunias renders the dark-skinned bather woefully badly, the features of her face so dark and crudely painted as to be barely discernible. In fact, in a description of Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing, one scholar mistakenly described the painting as depicting ‘three naked women bathing in a stream’, suggesting that the negress did not even register as a woman at all.46 Brunias’s rendering of the dark-skinned woman as less than desirable supports the observation that eighteenth-century British observers were reluctant to acknowledge the origins of the mixed-race population and the sexual relationships between white men and the women of colour who were compelled to submit to their authority.47 Through the peeping Tom, Brunias’s painting presents a titillating colonial fantasy while obscuring the very real political and personal power that bodies like his were authorised to exercise over bodies like those of the women depicted.48 Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing is notable, therefore, for the very real exercise of power and possession that it does not acknowledge. Brunias presents his mixed-race Venuses as objects worthy of desire in contrast to the crouching black woman, who is set apart from them even in the assigned title; she plays black drudge to their trio of saffron beauties. Of course, in reality, these mulatresses were not, as the ­­composition  of  the  painting suggests, native fruits of the Caribbean who organically emerged from the earth itself; they resulted from the union of black and white bodies implicitly rejected in the colonial fantasy that Brunias depicts.49 Aligned with the tree and low to the earth like the stones in the stream, only the admiring gaze of the negress’s barely visible eyes saves her from becoming little more than a rock in the landscape. This gaze connects her to the most intriguing figure in the composition, the aloof reclining woman at the picture’s far right. Upon initial inspection, this recumbent Venus’s relationship to the other figures in the work and to the colonial fantasy that Brunias presents is a perplexing puzzle. The final figure in the composition’s colour wheel that progresses towards a white ideal, only the greyish quality in her flesh suggests that she might be other than the purest of white specimens. In fact, she is the only bather whose skin is allowed to stand for itself, unchallenged by the comparison of white fabric against flesh; yet the person who recorded the title for the painting did not consider her racial whiteness a possibility.

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43

Attributed to Philip Wickstead, Portrait of a Lady, n.d.

While the Portrait of a Lady attributed to Philip Wickstead (fig. 43) is often cited as an important exception, very few eighteenth-century visual images of white women in the Caribbean exist.50 This fact represents both demographic reality and the popular belief, to be explored in depth in the next chapter, that life in the West Indian colonies was deleterious to the cultivation of proper white ladies (thus even white women who resided in the islands were likely to be depicted elsewhere). Clearly, the scene that Brunias depicts holds no proper place for a white woman, accounting for his use of a near-white figure as a surrogate. Brunias’s recumbent Venus offers all the connotations of organic sensuality associated with women of African descent in a body that could be read as ‘the fairest of them all’. If this figure, though not-quite-white, serves as a proxy for a pristine white feminine ideal, the aloof Diana who cannot be touched, then the darker women in the painting represent her attendant nymphs, suggesting two provocative implications. As liminal figures, the nymphs inhabit an intermediary space between the mortal world and the divine; they are not human, nor are they goddesses. Similarly, in the colonial imagination, women of colour stood at the threshold between human and object, and, in the case of the mulatresses, between black and



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

white. Moreover, the nymphs were frequently ravished by the gods so that Diana might protect her cherished virginity. Likewise, in the colonial imagination the perception of women of colour as innately sensual beings (at best) or as lascivious nymphomanics (at worst) allowed white women to maintain reputations of virtue and purity. The dark-skinned bather and the recumbent Venus constitute the polar ends of the human colour spectrum that Brunias presents; however, they share the strongest symbolic and compositional relationship in the painting. The reclining mulatress’s light colour ostensibly unites her racially with the two other mixed-race women in the painting, as does her long, graceful physique. However, only the title connects this creamy-coloured woman with the two saffron beauties who, to her exclusion, face each other, apparently rapt in conversation. More apart from their union than a part of it, she is separated from them socially and spatially. The lateral extension of her body in the water, underscoring its low position within the composition, contrasts with the verticality of the two other pale-skinned women, exaggerated by the height of their twin headwraps (an accessory associated with woman of African descent which, significantly, she does not wear). Indeed, while the two turbaned women, through their apparent interaction, form a ­­compositional partnership that excludes the lounging woman, she and the negress comprise an intriguing formal union of their own through the gaze cast upon her by the black woman and their shared low position in the composition. Returning to Titian’s Diana Surprised by Actaeon sheds some light upon the relationship between these two figures. In Titian’s depiction of the myth, the black attendant figure, whose red and white striped dress prefigures the cast-off garment in Brunias’s picture, has the most meaningful contact with Diana. While the other nymphs rush to cover themselves or are oblivious to Actaeon’s presence, the black woman holds a protective drape over Diana’s body, intimately resting her cheek against the goddess’s back in the process. Brunias replaces the physical contact of the figures with a longing gaze, but in his work, as in the Titian, the intimate action of the black figure is unidirectional; the implied relationship is not reciprocal. Just as in the British Caribbean, black and white are inextricably bound together, but the relationship is not one of equals. The tradition of page noire painting in Europe suggests a possible source of inspiration for Brunias’s decision to replace the physical contact in the Titian work with the unilateral gaze of black body upon white.51 Exemplified by works such as Pierre Mignard’s Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth (1682), these portraits typically feature an elite white woman attended by a black figure, often a child, in settings teeming with exotic objects that signify the wealth and status of the female sitter. Like the exotic

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flowers, parrots, coral, and pearls with which the sitters are depicted, the black attendants – themselves ‘merchandise’ acquired through trade – serve as little more than accessories who underscore their mistress’s wealth and whiteness. The presence of the page noire not only highlights the sitter’s physical whiteness but also buttresses the meaning and power of that whiteness by defining, in visual terms, the relations of power between black and white. In a unidirectional exchange that highlights the inequality that defines the relationship between black and white, the page noire generally gazes upwards adoringly at his or her mistress as the white woman typically stares outwards towards the viewer. Of course, Brunias’s recumbent Venus, clearly posited as a Caribbean Diana, turns her back to the viewer, unable to engage him with her eyes like the wealthy, powerful women of such portraits. Instead of her pale visage, it is the peeping Tom’s face that confronts the viewer. Both image and text provide precedents for the rear-view pose of Brunias’s Caribbean Diana; Ovid’s lyrics describe how Diana turned her back to the scene of trespass, a detail faithfully rendered in several visual depictions of the myth. For example, in Giovanni Battista Naldini’s Diana Surprised by Actaeon (1591), the artist renders the goddess from behind in an almost identical mirror image of Brunias’s West Indian Diana. In contrast to Botticelli’s fair Venus or even Stothard’s sable one, both of whom strike standing poses, this Diana assumes the position of the defeated – supine, in profile, and from behind, and perhaps the figure’s wistful gaze outside the work suggests the goddess’s lament for a power that she cannot possess in the world that the artist chronicles. This is not a world over which she can claim dominion. Despite her pale body, the title reminds us that she is not white,52 and despite her aloofness, the presence of the peeping Tom emphasises that she is not alone, nor is she in complete possession of her body. In fact, of the four female figures, it is her body, though withheld from the viewer, that is most fully on display before the voyeur hidden in the abundant boughs of the tree at the water’s edge. He possesses all the beauty before him, both human and vegetative; the women and the landscape of this Eden exist for his pleasure. Traditional images of Actaeon and Diana underscore the goddess’s power by highlighting Actaeon’s punishment. Artists frequently picture the accidental interloper with his hungry hounds, growing antlers as he looks upon the virginal beauty. However, the presence of the voyeur, at once hidden from the women and advertised to the viewer, underscores his lack of punishment, his authority to look. Robbing Diana of her dominion over the forest, the voyeur possesses this fecund land and the bodies, the lush fruits, that it appears to yield. In this New World forest, a naked feast of flesh for his eyes, Diana is stripped of her power, and Actaeon watches with impunity.



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

From Venus to Vixen: the ‘benefits’ of colonisation

Despite the affiliation of his work with ethnographic conventions that emphasised capturing the commonplace activities of exotic peoples engaged in their daily routines, it is highly improbable that Agostino Brunias stumbled upon the scene depicted in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing while traipsing through the tropical wilderness, sketchpad in hand. The painting’s obvious iconographic ties to the Venus tradition and Renaissance and Baroque depictions of Actaeon and Diana confirm that, even at the time of its rendering, the work possessed something other than documentary value and also point to the ideological stakes it proclaimed vis-à-vis the British colonial project. Far from depicting a scene of West Indian daily reality, Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing’s revision of European high culture puts Brunias’s remarkable conceptual creativity to work in order to represent a constructed image of Caribbean colonial fantasy. The image of the mixed-race Venus as depicted in the painting suggests the colonial Caribbean as a liminal world in which the pleasures of the flesh might be indulged without compromising one’s Britishness; where in fact one’s Britishness specifically entitled one to enjoy them. In exploring the relationship between constructions of mixed-race female sexuality and colonial ideology as expressed in Brunias’s Caribbean paintings, an analysis of William Blake’s roughly contemporary Europe Supported by Africa and America (1792, fig. 44) provides a useful transition from discussion of the Venus to the Vixen.53 Like the figures in Blake’s unquestionably imperialist and unequivocally erotic continental allegory, Brunias’s brown Venuses posit an implicit analogy between female flesh and physical geography, reinforcing British power over both. In Blake’s image, a fair Europe stands between a beautiful, dark-skinned Africa and an equally lovely, tawny America. Europe clasps her African companion’s hand and lazily rests her pale arm around the shoulder of her American sister, their bodies forming a human chain of comeliness echoed by the verdant garland draped in front of them. However, not all of the lovely links in this chain are equal; Africa and America wear gold bands around their upper arms, indicating that their bonds to Europe are not ones of sisterhood but of servitude. The placement of one of each of the darker figure’s arms around Europe’s body underscores this relationship; just as Britain built her great empire on a foundation of brown and black land and labour, their dark bodies constitute the pillars that support the fairest of them all. While the arm bracelets that Africa and America wear underscore their service to Europe, the long string of beads that Europe wears like a sash from shoulder to hip suggests the treasures that this service yields. Moreover, the harmony among the three figures implies Europe’s entitlement to these rewards. Although all three of the figures are nude, with similarly womanly bodies and full, round, pert breasts, Europe’s demure downcast gaze works to temper

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44

William Blake, Europe Supported by Africa and America, 1792



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

her nudity with a sign of modest femininity, while Africa’s and America’s eyes brazenly engage with the viewer, a suggestive gesture that invites him to visually consume their nakedness. This direct visual contact contrasts sharply with Brunias’s Caribbean Diana, who, her back to the viewer, cannot meet his eye. The visual dynamics of Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing posit the mixed-race Venus as an object for consumption who can offer no resistance. While both the title of Blake’s image and its composition firmly reinforce the power dynamics of the colonial relationship, Africa’s and America’s visual engagement with the viewer gestures towards the potential for some degree of subjectivity within this relationship that is lacking in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing and other mixed-race Venus works. However, the same seductive visual engagement with the viewer evinced by the darker beauties in the Blake engraving does appear in a number of Brunias’s paintings featuring mixed-race women. These mixed-race Vixen pictures differ importantly from the artist’s Venus images in which the male voyeur – implied or depicted – does the lascivious looking without challenge. More akin to Blake’s Africa and America with their enticing expressions, Brunias’s mixed-race Vixens run the gamut from subtly seductive to explicitly flirtatious, but their direct visual engagement with the viewer, typically buttressed by other pictorial features, always suggests an element of intentional allure that signals the participation of the subject. Corresponding to this conscious, modern display of sexuality, these works are visually informed not by paintings from the Renaissance or Baroque period but by pictorial traditions related to urbanity and modernity such as the urban ‘Cries’ genre discussed in the previous chapter and popular culture fashion plates.54 Moreover, sustaining the visual analogy between female bodies and terrestrial ones established in the Venus works, Brunias uses visual metaphor to relate these finely cultivated mixed-race Vixens to the cultivated produce of the West Indies, comparing them to harvested fruits and cut flowers. Along these same lines, the artist captures the Vixen not in scenes of Edenic tropical wilderness but in the midst of clearly commercial transactions in colonial outposts whose built environments indicate that they are in the process of development. In these works, Diana, far from being a powerless feast of flesh for Actaeon’s eyes, candidly returns the voyeur’s gaze with her own suggestive stare that says, ‘Come on! Let’s make a deal!’ Cultivating appeal: the mixed-race Vixen as embodiment of a particularly colonial Caribbean sexuality

The mulatresses in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing personify one colonial stereotype about mixed-race female sexuality – that it was innate and inevitable. However, the opposite notion – that mixed-race women were

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­­ wilfully whorish opportunists who desired and cultivated the attentions of white men – was simultaneously just as powerful. In Five Years in Trinidad and St. Vincent: A View of the Social Condition of the White, Coloured, and Negro Population of the West Indies, Mrs A. C. Carmichael, who lived in the islands in the early nineteenth century, shares her negative opinion of the mixed-race female population: to allure young men who are newly come to the country, or entice the inexperienced, may be said to be their [mixed-race women’s] principal object. The lower classes of the white population … deprived in great measure of white female society, are easily ensnared by these handsome and attractive young women … Generally speaking, the coloured women have an insatiable passion for showy dresses and jewels, and are decked out, not only in gorgeous, but in costly articles of this description.55

The specific word choices that Carmichael makes in composing her tirade – allure, entice, ensnared, insatiable passion, showy – connotatively reinforce the image of depraved mixed-race female sexuality that she paints verbally. It is important to recognise that Caribbean women of colour were not simply the passive objects represented in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing, and many African, Afro-Creole, and mixed-race women did use their sexuality – one of the few resources available to them – to their ­­advantage in the colonial situation in order to secure necessities, favours, indulgences, or luxuries, and to avoid punishment. Trevor Burnard suggests that black and mixed-race ‘[w]omen’s agency within these relationships [i.e. interracial relationships] caused some slippage in the all-encompassing structures of white male dominance and allowed a minority of women to create a space for themselves within these structures where they could exercise a limited but measurable power of their own’. However, we must always remember that women exercised such agency within the circumscribed reality allowed them in the context of slavery and colonialism, finding whatever small pockets of power they could in their lives. Moreover, in recognising this exercise of agency, I do not mean to support the previously discussed popular myth that white men might actually have had their very real personal and political power completely overcome by the charms of black or brown beauties, or to suggest that Brunias’s Vixen pictures necessarily correspond to colonial reality. Instead, I assert that Brunias’s Vixen images recognise the exercise of such agency by enslaved and otherwise oppressed women of colour while simultaneously exorcising the potential threat to colonial power that such activity might have posed by repackaging it as a provocative and palatable colonial fantasy. Although the brown Vixen is fully clothed – and, in fact, typically wears elaborate ensembles with multiple layers – the sexualised body of the



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

­­ mixed-race woman is no less at the centre of these pictures than in those that feature the brown Venus. Speaking of eighteenth-century allegorical paintings of elite French women in mythological guises in which the sitter directly engages the viewer through eye contact, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth observes that such images represent the double bind that these women confronted with regard to gender and power.56 The guise of allegory freed them to reveal their bodies in a way that would otherwise have been unauthorised, showing, for example, their legs and breasts. However, only in terms of this kind of bodily display could their power be expressed; in other words, feminine power had no other idiom for expression save sexuality. Still, these images represented known people of prominence with the status and means to commission portraits, communicating unequivocally their position as empowered subjects. Given this, though their portraits reference feminine sexuality, their gaze cannot titillate the viewer in the same way as an image, definitively not a portrait, of an anonymous woman captured in the midst of some mundane activity such as those in Brunias’s mixed-race Vixen pictures. The mixedrace Vixens whom Brunias paints may stare boldly out of the canvases like agents offering themselves for sale; however, the implied British male viewer retains the power to purchase. Like the Caribbean fruits and flowers with which the paintings identify them, they are simply rewards of the colonial enterprise. On 15 July 1983 a series of six untitled Brunias works went up for auction at Christie’s, all labelled simply – or, depending on your point of view, rather complicatedly – ‘colonial scene’. Each of the works featured a woman or women representing varying degrees of mixed-racial background and engaged in a variety of mundane activities. Both parts of the seemingly generic and innocuous appellation ‘colonial scene’ indicate something about the foundation of the artist’s work in British colonial ideology by signalling the type of information Brunias’s West Indian pictures communicate to a viewer. For example, the auction house might have chosen to refer to the works as ‘Caribbean scenes’ or ‘West Indian scenes’ or ‘pictures of women of colour’. Each of these labels would have provided more specific information to potential bidders; however, the generic ‘colonial scene’ apparently seemed most apt to Christie’s for conveying the subject matter of the images. In other words, the paintings’ ‘colonial-ness’ proved more compelling than any other feature about them. More than simply pretty pictures of exotic islands or ideology-free visual documents of diverse peoples, these pictures depict – and, through their depiction, reify and define – colonial relations of power, particularly with regard to race and gender. Moreover, although the auction house certainly had a specific definition of ‘scene’ in mind, that is, ‘a view of a place’, the connotation of ‘scene’ as part of a staged narrative also works for Brunias’s images of the mixed-race Vixen, as these images are carefully

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­­ composed to function as such. Finally, examining the homonymous relationship between ‘scene’ and ‘seen’ also leads to provocative considerations of these images as one tries to untangle the dynamics of looking and seeing that are critical to understanding them. One of these ‘colonial scenes’, Two Mulatresses and a Child with a Black Woman Selling Fruit* (fig. 45), features three women and a naked baby in front of a dwelling. Standing just to the right of the picture’s centre, a tawny woman commands the viewer’s attention to such an extent that the other figures in the work are reduced to mere props, virtually lifeless pictorial features that provide contrast and context to the lovely woman who is clearly the scene’s leading lady. Although she is well dressed in a striped gown cinched at the front with laces, worn over a white chemise with loose, billowy sleeves meant to accommodate the tropical heat, the heaving swell of bosom revealed by her ruffled décolletage commands as much, if not more, attention than the ensemble itself. From beneath her casually tied headwrap that allows strands of her long wavy hair to hang free, she stares out from the canvas, making direct eye-contact with the viewer. The contrast of her gaze with that of the other two women, both of whom are shown in profile with their eyes turned away from the viewer, renders it subtly suggestive. The pear-shaped gourd cradled gracefully between the standing woman’s palms compounds this allure. Ostensibly meant to represent a native fruit of the Caribbean, the object is suggestive on a number of levels. Held in front of her body, specifically at the level of her pubis, its shape and placement suggest the very real body that exists beneath her voluminous skirts. Moreover, though the item ostensibly represents a potential purchase selected from the basket of wares offered by the black woman at her feet, the Vixen, holding the fruit before her like a gift, appears to be the one doing the offering. The combination of her gaze and the fruit – a surrogate for her own body – that she presents like a gift transforms her from customer to both hawker and merchandise. She, too, is a Caribbean commodity, and while the dark-skinned woman who kneels on the ground in front of her basket of produce is explicitly the seller in the picture, the prominence of the central woman’s long gold earbobs and her comparatively elaborate dress, taken together with her direct yet demure gaze and the flirty offering of her fruit, suggest that she, too, knows something of the art of exchange. Extending this body/fruit metaphor even further, the pear shape of the gourd and its position also recall the inverted pear shape of a woman’s womb, highlighting the subtly rounded shape of the belly of the Vixen’s dress that can also be interpreted as alluding to pregnancy. The child in the picture, presumably the Vixen’s son or daughter, clings to the mother’s skirts, the literal representation of the fruit of this implied womb. Indeed, the child who apparently stands behind the basket of produce offered for sale can also be read as



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

Agostino Brunias, Colonial Scene (Two Mulatresses and a Child with a Black Woman Selling Fruit), n.d.

standing inside it, emphasising its identification with the fruit. Interestingly, like the Venuses in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing, the child is another mixed-race ‘fruit’ who Brunias’s picture metaphorically identifies with the produce of the land itself rather than the reality of interracial ­­ sex.

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The presence of the other two women in the image amplifies the viewer’s sense of the Vixen’s sexuality. Although the slightly darker woman to her right does not engage the viewer directly with her eyes, offering the same sort of invitation as her companion, her more explicit bodily sexuality stands in for that of the Vixen. More direct than the suggestive placement of fruit, the extremely low, round neckline of her loosely fitting white dress, carelessly askew, reveals her left breast, while her skirt, hitched up past the knee, puts her leg on brazen display. Moreover, the position of her hands on her leg, one upon her knee while the other grazes her calf, echoes the placement of the Vixen’s hands upon the fruit and forges a visual connection between the gourd she holds and the darker woman’s leg. This also reinforces the visual analogy between fruit and body as well as underscoring the identification of the two women with each other. In other words, the darker woman’s presence makes explicit what the Vixen’s gaze and the gourd can only imply: that it is her brown body that is actually for sale here. Both she and the kneeling negress serve much the same function as black attendant figures in conventional images that juxtapose a black servant with a sexualised white woman, as in myriad Orientalist pictures, particularly those of Gérôme. As Deborah Willis and Carla Williams note, these figures, providing more than visual contrast, act as a marker of the paler woman’s sexuality: ‘If the titillation of the clothed or semi-clothed Orientalist female lay in her representation of being “veiled”, or in some other way inaccessible, then the black servant was her metaphorical unveiling within the frame.’57 Moreover, as in Two Mulatresses and a Child with a Black Woman Selling Fruit, though the paler woman may engage with the viewer through a suggestive gaze, rarely does the black figure in this type of image make direct eye-contact with the viewer, instead looking down or to the side with the knowledge that ‘[s]he is not a participant in this drama; her presence is [merely] required’, a prop that signifies the erotic nature of the scene.58 In addition to underscoring the erotic undertones of the picture, Brunias’s use of three differently hued women in the painting also suggests a narrative of West Indian progress under colonialism. Reminiscent of the circular colour continuum of flesh tones in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing, taken together the three women in the picture represent a pyramidal progression beginning with the kneeling negress, moving to the seated bronze-skinned woman, and ending in the paler face of the standing mulatress whose charms might be had for the right premium. However, in contrast to the timeless, static Eden of Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing, Brunias’s mixed-race Vixen pictures use this colour spectrum in conjunction with other pictorial features to demonstrate the advancement of West Indian civilisation under colonial rule. This visual progress narrative aligns with Kriz’s assertion that Brunias’s West Indian pictures promoted a colonialist vision of the Caribbean as a place



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

of nascent refinement in which progress might be achieved under the management of the Crown’s settlers. Relating Brunias’s images to the urban ‘Cries’ tradition, Kriz observes that the genre offered Brunias’s viewers ‘the promise of an urbanity that has not (yet) materialized’ in the Lesser Antilles.59 Moreover, Brunias’s Vixen pictures, implying a connection between progress (defined in terms of capitalism, European-style modernity, etc.) and whiteness, support Kriz’s subsequent contention that the mulatress was the only viable candidate for embodying the possibilities of Caribbean progress that Brunias endeavoured to portray. Kriz asserts, and I concur, that Brunias’s pictures promoted a vision of the Caribbean as a place of nascent refinement in which progress of the particularly British sort might be achieved. The artist called upon popular eighteenth-century discourses that associated the condition of women with the place of a particular culture on a scale of social evolution beginning with a primitive stage defined by hunting and gathering and culminating in commercial civilisation.60 In addition to the pigmentocratic pyramid comprised by the three women, the entrepreneurial nature of the scene and the implied triumph of modern horticulture and architecture over nature in this picture suggest the idea of progress and its relationship to whiteness. While Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing presents a primeval tableau dominated by uncultivated nature, the basket of fruit and vegetables being sold by the black woman – who, though probably enslaved, engages here in capitalistic enterprise rather than hard labour for the planter – ­represents the advantage of guiding natural Caribbean fecundity with cultivated agriculture, that is, the transformation of God’s miraculous bounty into marketable products made possible through British colonial management. Although visual analogy still links the mulatress in the Vixen pictures to the natural produce of the islands – in this case to the large pear-shaped fruit – it is now cultivated produce raised expressly in order to be sold. The figures’ relationships to modernity, suggested by their placement relative to nature and architecture, also underscore the narrative of progress through colonial management and its relationship to whiteness. While the black woman, who is spatially separated from the tightly closed group ­­comprised of the other three figures in the picture, is aligned with a relatively rudimentary structure composed of unprocessed natural materials and a thatched roof, Brunias positions the two mixed-race women and the lightskinned child against a two-storey building made of hewn wooden planks with large, regular-shaped windows shaded by slanted awnings. The dwelling’s unrealistically tall doorframe, extending several feet above the standing woman’s head, and the fact that the height of the building cannot be contained by the borders of the picture emphasise the modernity of the structure, especially when juxtaposed with the palm tree on the other side of the picture which, though tall, is nonetheless dwarfed by the building.

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46

Agostino Brunias, A West Indian Flower Girl and Two other Free Women of Color, c. 1769, oil on canvas

An analysis of another Vixen picture, A West Indian Flower Girl and Two other Free Women of Color (fig. 46, hereafter West Indian Flower Girl), confirms these observations and reveals the visual dynamics that make these types of images work. Depicting a similar episode of commercial activity, the painting features two women admiring a selection of flowers being offered



Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana

by a street hawker. Reiterating the notion of progress and its relationship to the British colonial project, in contrast to the nude Venuses and even to the flower seller who wears a simple loose blouse and skirt, these two women don fashionable European-style attire and accessories – bodices clearly shaped by stays, a lacy cap and bonnet, a delicate fan, a fine broad-brimmed hat – that signal their refinement.61 This refinement, juxtaposed with the Vixen’s bawdy flirtatiousness, suggests a colonial combination that can be aptly described as the perfect convergence of the desirable and the available. The Vixen ­­embodies all the feminine style and grace that colonists had been bred to find attractive in a woman, contained in a package white enough to desire but not so white that it could escape the perceptions of women of colour as hypersexual or the yoke of European colonial power. Moreover, in addition to showcasing her attractiveness, the Vixen’s fashionability reinforces the notion of the islands as a burgeoning space of refinement. Kriz observes a similarity between Brunias’s interest in sartorial display, as well as his attention to gesture and pose, and the late eighteenthcentury interest in fashionability, evident in the ‘Cries’ tradition, in scenes of fashionable life, and in the fashion prints that became popular in England in the 1770s. In contrast to the more strictly ethnographically informed images such as those of Red Caribs that ‘enforce stasis, fixing human types “in” space but “out” of time, fashion plates and scenes of fashionable life depend upon flux. Through their attentiveness to the latest variations in dress, hairstyle, and social setting, they enforce the idea of change’, and promote the idea of modern development through commercial culture and society.62 The backdrop for the commercial interaction that Brunias depicts also clearly indicates that these Vixens inhabit a budding urban space. In fact, compositionally, the work offers a modern reversal of Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing with its lush greenery that overwhelms all but one small, skyfilled corner of the canvas; in West Indian Flower Girl, tall modern structures and cobblestone streets dominate the picture, boxing in all but a tiny patch of blue sky. Significantly, the image depicts no natural, growing vegetation at all. Instead of nature overgrown for its own sake, the flora depicted in West Indian Flower Girl is a tray of cut flowers offered for sale. Moreover these are not the large, thick and hearty blossoms associated with tropical nature but tiny, delicate flowers that suggest a feminine daintiness then associated with proper women in ‘civilised’ societies. The relatively light-skinned mulatress, clearly the Vixen of the scene, selects a flower from the peddler’s tray and lifts it towards her nose as if to sniff. However, she directs her attention and her eyes not to the stem of tiny buds in her hand, but outside of the canvas, towards the viewer. The slightly upturned corners of her mouth convey a ‘come-hither’ flirtatiousness. Indeed, not only does she not actually look at the stem of tiny flowers that she is ostensibly ­­

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considering for purchase, she does not really sniff them either. Instead of holding them under her nose, she brings them to the side of her face, inviting a comparison between their beauty and hers that implicitly suggests a sort of equivalence and extends the visual analogy between the mixed-race female body and the colonised West Indies. Both represent Caribbean beauty, and both are, perhaps, for sale. Just as in Two Mulatresses and a Child with a Black Woman Selling Fruit, given the position of her hand and her inviting gaze, the Vixen in this picture can be perceived as offering the viewer both a whiff of the intoxicating aroma of the flowers as well as the precious flower of her own womanhood. The ultimate symbol of specifically Caribbean and explicitly colonial raced and gendered power dynamics, Brunias’s mixed-race Vixens offer up the precious booty – figurative and literal – of their native land. In contrast to so many of the figures in Brunias’s oeuvre, even the other figures in this composition, who seem stiff and permanently frozen, the Vixen’s gaze in West Indian Flower Girl animates her. The viewer can imagine her coquettish laugh in response to his advance, can picture her delicate arm replacing the flower on its tray. The Vixen’s Mona Lisa smile suggests that she is solely engaged with the viewer – not the flower, not the vendor, not the exquisitely dressed beauty to her right; like her native land, she exists solely for the viewer’s eyes and only for his pleasure.63 Showcasing great ingenuity, Brunias mobilises the multivalent figure of the mulatress by deftly drawing upon his knowledge of high European tradition as well as trends in British popular visual culture, revising them to fit the context of the colonial Caribbean. The sustained visual analogy that Brunias’s pictures construct between female bodies, the islands, and their produce in both the Venus and Vixen works demonstrates unique conceptual sophistication. Moreover, the possibility of reading mixed-race female agency into the artist’s Vixen pictures reveals how Brunias’s paintings, once again, insert a potentially subversive subtext into the plantocratic script only to exorcise the threat it might have potentially represented. As with his pictures of AfroCaribbeans, Brunias’s visual counter-narrative does not preclude the sort of reading that would have appealed to the colonialist fantasies of his patrons. For example, staged specifically for the white male gaze, his Vixen images effectively close off the possibility of mixed-race female power that they initially imply, excising the threat of such power to the colonial order. The superficial signals of colonial progress included in these paintings – the fashionable ladylike dress of the Vixen, the capitalist context of commercial transaction, the modern colonial settlement-under-construction as backdrop – point to the sort of refined civilisation-in-the-making that Kriz rightly suggests that Brunias’s images mobilised the symbol of the mulatress to represent, while the Venus pictures preserve the image of the tropics as a wild sexual playground. Therefore, rather than countering the West Indies’



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associations with the pleasures of the flesh and sins of immoral profit, Brunias’s Venus and Vixen pictures demonstrate the mixed-race woman’s ability to stand for both the colonies’ ‘natural’ tendency towards indulgence and their nascent potential for refinement. Located somewhere between prelapsarian Eden and modern London, the islands promised to the colonial seeker, through the figure of the mulatress, both primeval pleasures and unparalleled profit, a raunchy ride and a bit of refinement – and all in one pretty brown package. Notes 1 The other three extant works in the series, French Mulatresses of St. Dominica in their Proper Dress (fig. 36), French Mulatress of St. Dominica and a Negro Woman (fig. 37), and Mulatress Purchasing Fruit from a Negro Woman* (fig. 24), are also in the Peabody collection and bear identical tags on the verso. All four paintings, which were part of John Gardiner’s original gift of six Brunias works in 1790, feature mixed-race women. While the other two of the six Gardiner works have been lost, my research uncovered a label for one of them, apparently known as Caribs of St. Vincent. Dated 31 January 1890, the label probably records the transfer of the paintings from the Harvard Library Collection to the museum which was not established until 1866. 2 Tobin describes the painting as featuring ‘a young slave woman kneeling before a basket of fruit, her arm outstretched, offering it to the standing, more elegantly attired mulatto woman’. However, I find that, next to the black woman – who wears a long blue and white striped skirt and white overblouse with a red h ­ eadkerchief – the mulatress is, in fact, very shabbily dressed. Indeed, she is somewhat  undressed, a significant fact given the emphasis placed on covering the body as indicative of a person’s or society’s civilised nature. The mixed-race woman’s  loose blouse is completely open at the top, revealing her breast in full, and on the bottom she wears nothing but a petticoat. She wears no overskirt, and her slip is short enough to reveal her feet and ankles. In contrast to the tall, elegant  headwraps of many of Brunias’s other mixed-race women, her casual head tie is sloppily arranged. An exceptional mulatress figure for her  degree of undress, this  mixed-race woman appears to have stepped out of her rather primitive dwelling in her bedclothes! Tobin makes no mention of the darkskinned woman who stands between the paler woman and the fruit vendor. Dark like the black woman and partially undressed like the mulatress, this topless woman unites the two figures, suggesting, perhaps, that they are not so different as their opposite skin tones might suggest. This unique painting deserves a fuller treatment than I can offer here; however, I would begin by suggesting that the revelation/fondling of the woman’s breasts signifies her organic sexuality; see Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, p. 160. In a different reading of this image, Kriz observes its rude, sexual humour; see Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, pp. 66–68.

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3 Patricia Mohammed, ‘Gendering the Caribbean Picturesque’, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, 1.1 (2007), p. 12. 4 Ibid., p. 4. 5 This is Kriz’s primary argument in the version of her essay on Brunias’s marketing mulatresses published in Felicity Nussbaum’s 2003 anthology, The Global Eighteenth Century, which I reviewed while researching this chapter. The revised and expanded version of this essay, published in Kriz’s 2008 book Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, features subtle changes that bring her argument more in line with my own with reference to the mulatress’s potential to ­­signify both the nascent refinement of the West Indies and the more illicit pleasures offered there. In both versions of the essay, Kriz offers a strong analysis of Brunias’s depiction of mulatresses at market and as a marketing device used to encourage the settlement of the Ceded Islands. Finding no need to replicate her good work, I have focused my discussion in this chapter (and, to an extent, in Chapter 4) on iterations and implications of the mulatress figure with which Kriz does not engage significantly. The paintings that comprise the primary foundation for my argument in this chapter receive little or no treatment by Kriz in either version of her essay. 6 Trevor Burnard, ‘The Sexual Life of an Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Slave Overseer’, in Merril D. Smith (ed.), Sex and Sexuality in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 173. 7 For Christer Petley’s insightful analysis of Simon Taylor’s letters, see ‘“Home” and “this country”: Britishness and Creole Identity in the Letters of a Transatlantic Slaveholder’, Atlantic Studies, 6.1 (2009), pp. 43–61. In addition to this work and the aforementioned Burnard, for more on the sexual exploitation of black women in Caribbean slave societies, including further discussion of Thistlewood, see Nelson, Slavery, Geography, and Empire, pp. 140–149. 8 Burnard, ‘The Sexual Life of an Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Slave Overseer’, pp. 168–169. 9 Ibid., p. 171. 10 Ibid., p. 172. 11 See, for example, Ann duCille, ‘“Othered” Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1 (July 1990), pp. 116–121. 12 Synthesising these two poles, Brunias also portrayed mulatresses in a more neutral manner in the kinds of images of mixed-race women at market discussed by Kriz. These less extreme mulatto beauties provided an ideal balance between the Venus and the Vixen, offering a kinder, gentler face for the quintessentially colonial West Indian body of the mixed-race woman. 13 The brown Venus was a recurrent figure in the artist’s oeuvre, featuring in his numerous scenes of women bathing or washing clothes. While the general assertions I offer about the brown Venus figure apply to any number of Brunias images, for practical and scholarly reasons this chapter primarily examines one picture, Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing, in exploring the construction of the brown Venus through Brunias’s work. Because of its pictorial and ideological



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complexity, Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing functions as an ur-text for the brown Venus works, containing in a single painting the various characteristics of this type of image that are scattered across other works. Moreover, it is one of the few publicly accessible brown Venus works and happens to be at my home institution; therefore, I have had the opportunity to study it closely in person. 14 In fact, Brunias inscribed this self-authenticating text on the images of the Caribbean that he engraved. 15 For background, see the discussion of the ‘Cries’ tradition in the previous chapter. 16 Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–1820 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 34. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 2. 19 Barbara Bush, ‘“Sable Venus”, “She Devil” or “Drudge”? British Slavery and the “Fabulous Fiction” of Black Women’s Identities, c. 1650–1838’, Women’s History Review, 9.4 (2007), p. 770, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612020000200262 (acces­­ sed 16 May 2017). 20 Charmaine A. Nelson, ‘Vénus Africaine: Race, Beauty, and African-ness’, in Jan Marsh (ed.), Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900 (Manchester and Birmingham: Manchester Art Gallery and Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 2005), p. 48. 21 Bush, ‘“Sable Venus”, “She Devil” or “Drudge”?’, p. 762. 22 Ibid., p. 770. 23 Excerpted from Isaac Teale, The Sable Venus: An Ode, in James G. Basker (ed.), Amazing Grace: Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 147–149. 24 Translation in Sollors (ed.), Anthology of Interracial Literature, p. 97. 25 See, for example, George Herbert’s ‘A Negress Courts Cestus, a Man of a Different Colour’ (1633), John Cleveland’s ‘A Faire Nimph Scorning a Black Boy Courting Her’ (1658), Edward Herbert of Cherbury’s ‘To Mrs. Diana Cecyll’, ‘The Brown Beauty’, and ‘Another Sonnet to Black It Self’, and several poems by Eldred Revett; all reproduced in Sollors (ed.), Anthology of Interracial Literature, pp. 96–114. 26 Wood quoted in Mohammed, ‘Gendering the Caribbean Picturesque’, p. 9. 27 Given the prevalence and power of the ‘Sable Venus’ trope during the eighteenth century, the work’s title and association with Teale’s poem, and the fittingness of the Venus model to describe my observations of Brunias’s images of mixed-race women, I have chosen to speak about Stothard’s image in terms of Venus iconography and mythology. However, I have to agree with Rosalie Smith McCrea that, compositionally, Stothard’s image more closely resembles another ‘sea triumph’ picture, Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea. McCrea notes that Stothard produced a number of works in the sea triumph genre and suggests the ideological significance of his use of Galatea rather than Venus as a compositional model; see Rosalie Smith McCrea, ‘Dis-ordering the World in the 18th Century: The Duplicity of Connoisseurship: Masking the Culture of Slavery, or, The Voyage of the Sable Venus: Connoisseurship and the Trivializing of Slavery’, in Sandra Courtman (ed.), The Society for Caribbean Studies Annual Conference Papers 3

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(2002), http://community-languages.org.uk/SCS-Papers/olv3p16.PDF (accessed 6 June 2017). Furthermore, Galatea means ‘she who is milk white’ in Greek. Therefore, depicting the Sable Venus in the manner of Galatea represented a deep irony that would not have been lost on viewers of the image familiar with the classical language. 28 Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw has also described the Sable Venus as a black pearl; see Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art in association with University of Washington Press, 2006), p. 32. The fact that we independently developed such similar readings of the Sable Venus image testifies to our shared scholarly concerns and my indebtedness to her mentorship. 29 As Trevor Burnard explains, white men excused ‘their licentiousness and their “infatuation” with black or colored women as resulting from the lasciviousness of black women and the passivity of white women rather than arising from their own passionate urges and lack of self-control’. See Burnard, ‘The Sexual Life of an Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Overseer’, pp. 175–176. 30 Mohammed, ‘Gendering the Caribbean Picturesque’, p. 12. 31 Theodor Storm (translation by Judith Ryan), ‘From Beyond the Seas’, in Sollors (ed.), Anthology of Interracial Literature, p. 264; emphasis added. 32 Importantly, Jenny – more white-skinned than brown – confirms that the connotations of mixed-racial heritage persisted regardless of whether or not traces of African ancestry were visually discernible, a fact with significant ramifications discussed in the next chapter. 33 Storm, ‘From Beyond the Seas’, p. 266. 34 Ibid., pp. 266–267. 35 Ibid., p. 264. 36 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Brooks, 1978). 37 Featuring lands from Morocco to India, the geographic parameters of the ‘Orient’ were nebulous as far as eighteenth- and nineteenth–century visual cultural production is concerned. Orientalism in the visual arts is most strongly associated with the nineteenth century. However, eighteenth-century examples do exist; see, for example, Jean-Marc Nattier’s Mademoiselle de Clermont en Sultane of 1733 (fig. 39) described by Kathleen Nicholson as the first odalisque; see Nicholson, ‘Practicing Portraiture: Mademoiselle de Clermont and J.-M. Nattier’, in Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Williams (eds), Women, Art, and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003). 38 For a discussion of history (or lack thereof) and temporality in Orientalist painting, see Linda Nochlin, ‘The Imaginary Orient’, in her The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 36. 39 Cultured Europeans would have known the tales of the Arabian Nights through French translations by Jean Antoine Galland published between 1704 and 1707, though knowledge of the stories clearly existed in Europe well before that date. Italian Renaissance writers such as Masuccio Salernitano and Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio obviously drew upon the tales for inspiration. The tales feature several stories in which interracial concerns, often combined with slavery, are important



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to plot development, including ‘The Story of the Eunuch Bekhit’, ‘The Man from Yemen and his Six Slave Girls’, ‘The Story of King Shehriyar and his Brother’, and ‘The Story of the Enchanted Youth’; all of these tales are reprinted in Sollors (ed.), Anthology of Interracial Literature, pp. 55–93. 40 Nochlin, ‘The Imaginary Orient’, p. 37. 41 Ibid., p. 49. Emily Apter discusses the pronounced implications of sexual activity among women in the harem, arguing that they are so overwhelming as to produce what she calls the ‘haremization effect’ and actually constitute a potential threat to patriarchal power. However, Reina Lewis, discussing Apter’s work, suggests that this sapphic challenge to the Oriental patriarchy, rather than precluding the ­­pleasure that a Western male viewer might take from this type of visual imagery, effectively creates a psychic opening for his scopophilic satisfaction, as it ­­‘constitutes a phallic interdictory power of the harem that threatens to keep him out’; see Emily Apter, ‘Female Trouble in the Colonial Harem’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 4.1 (1992), pp. 205–223, and Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 180. 42 This painting also offers another opportunity to speculate about Brunias’s insertion of a self-portrait into a voyeuristic scene. 43 Caroline Winterer, ‘Venus on the Sofa: Women, Neoclassicism, and the Early American Republic’, Modern Intellectual History, 2.1 (2005), p. 48. 44 For more information on Ovid’s popularity in eighteenth-century England, see James M. Horowitz, ‘Ovid in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England’, in John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands (eds), A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid (Chichester: John Wiley, 2014). 45 The figure in Rembrandt’s 1654 Bathsheba is also compositionally very similar to Brunias’s central mulatress, suggesting that the artist drew on a variety of bathing images for inspiration. 46 Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, p. 149. In fairness, Tobin might be referring to the fact that only three of the women are actually in contact with the water, as the fourth – ostensibly already finished with her dip – stands on the tiny patch of shore drying herself. However, accepting this explanation depends upon one’s faith in the author’s insistence on extreme precision, and only two of the women can accurately be described as ‘bathing in the stream’ as Tobin suggests. While the recumbent mulatress and the negress can fairly be described as in the water, the other figure in contact with the water sits atop a boulder, immersing only her left foot, an action that, in my view, hardly constitutes ‘bathing in a stream’. 47 Ibid., pp. 147–149. 48 Given the omnipresence of the mulatress in Brunias’s paintings, the paltry attention Brunias pays to mixed-race males, and the way that he portrays them when he does depict them, is noteworthy. Brunias’s mulatto men almost never possess any degree of manly authority; they are foppish and effeminate figures who, frequently pictured from behind or cowering beneath their towering female counterparts’ stately headdresses, are failures at the game of seduction. Thus, Brunias effectively paints them out of competition for the affections, much less the bodies, of mixed-race women, reserving such spoils for the white men who were his primary

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­­ audience. As Kriz so plainly puts it, ‘These mulatto “suitors” may be filled with desire for the mulatto woman, but their obsequious solicitations are doomed to failure.’ They are doomed precisely because, as Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing illustrates, mixed-race female bodies were prizes reserved for white men in colonial contests of sexuality. See Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 51. 49 While the black woman is rejected as a sexual object in Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing, in another painting Brunias does visually gesture towards the reality of sexual relationships between white colonists and black women. In a stunning and complicated view of the Roseau River valley in Dominica (fig. 54), the artist pictures a large and diverse array of people engaged in a variety of activities on the banks of the river. Among them, to the left side of the canvas, is a strange and completely intriguing pair of figures – a fully dressed, elegantly attired white man literally riding a topless dark-skinned black woman as she fords the water! She does not carry him in any practical, get-the-job-done manner, such as piggyback. Instead, he straddles her shoulder, resting his hands atop her head and riding her astride as one would a horse such that the side of her face, which wears an incongruously dreamy expression, presses into his groin, making the sexual innuendo unequivocal. However, the artist drives his point home even further by placing the pair directly next to a horse and rider and painting the horse and the woman in similar shades of brown, compounding the sexual connotations with a correlation between the woman as sexual partner and the horse as beast of burden at the service of his master. On the one hand, Brunias appeals to white fantasies of the sexual escapades to be had on the island; however, in characteristic fashion, he almost comically undercuts this fantasy by rendering the man as so remarkably puny and curiously tiny relative to the woman whom he rides that one has to entertain the suggestion of impotence. He, after all, assumes the straddle position traditionally gendered female while she inserts herself between his legs. The identification between the woman and the horse also carries subtle implications of bestiality. 50 Little is known about this painting, possibly set in Jamaica, and generally attributed to the British artist Philip Wickstead who travelled to Jamaica in 1773. Wickstead apparently established himself as a painter of single and group portraits for the plantocracy; however, Kriz notes that, in addition to issues with accurately dating Wickstead’s works, it does not seem that his ‘images of white creoles were ever widely known or circulated outside of Jamaica’. See Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 215, note 63. See also Frank Cundall, ‘Philip Wickstead of Jamaica’, Connoisseur, 94 (1934), pp. 174–175. 51 Gabriella de la Rosa originated this useful term that carries with it nuanced connotations not conveyed by less specific, roughly equivalent terms such as ‘black attendant figure’. See Gabriella de la Rosa, ‘The Trope of Race in the Portraiture and Print Culture of Ancien Regime France’, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2008. 52 Although the title is probably not Brunias’s own, records at Harvard University related to its acquisition indicate that the terms it employs accurately reflect period perceptions of the women’s race. See Chapter 4, note 7 below.



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53 For another provocative analysis of this image, see Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography, pp. 135–139. 54 Both Tobin and Kriz have discussed Brunias’s works in relation to the urban ‘Cries’ tradition of depicting the English poor and labouring classes; see Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, pp. 140–43, and Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 62. The relationship between Brunias’s work and eighteenthcentury fashion plates, first observed by Kriz, receives more attention later in this chapter. 55 Carmichael, Five Years in Trinidad and St. Vincent, pp. 71, 75. 56 Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, ‘The Erotic Body’ (lecture), HAA 174s: Body Image in French Visual Culture, Harvard University, 26 September 2007. 57 Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body, A Photographic History (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002), p. 39. 58 Ibid., p. 40. 59 Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 62. 60 See Kriz, ‘Marketing Mulatresses’, pp. 197–209. 61 This observation about the hierarchy of dress applies to Two Mulatresses and a Child with a Black Woman Selling Fruit as well. The unstructured, unembellished ensembles of the negress and the darker-skinned mulatress, whose bare leg alludes to the primeval nudity of the brown Venuses, contrast sharply with the dress of the elaborately attired Vixen whose bodice is cinched at the waist with laces. 62 Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 63. 63 On this point, I differ somewhat from Kriz, who pays much attention to the dynamics of looking in both versions of her essay on Brunias’s mulatresses. She concentrates on the figure of the mulatress in the bustling marketplace, a mode in which Brunias typically chose to present a more neutral variation of mixed-race female sexuality that can be regarded as a balanced synthesis of the Venus and Vixen pictures studied in this chapter. Kriz notes the way in which these women of colour seem to have no place to rest their eyes, no natural object of the gaze: ‘Her gaze is elsewhere or nowhere: she stares into space or in the direction of (not directly at) another person. While she may be making a show of her modesty, she seems as unwilling to look at the commodities she is about to purchase as at the men who solicit her attention.’ This may be true of this particular subset of paintings of mixed-race women; however, viewing these markedly more bland images of mixed-race women in isolation misses the rich opportunities for interpretation that are yielded by a more comprehensive analysis of Brunias’s mulatresses, one that includes those who are looked at, even when they look away (the Venuses), and those who brazenly engage the viewer with their eyes (the Vixens); Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, p. 59.

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Can you find the white woman in this picture? Brunias’s ‘ladies’ of ambiguous race

In Linen Market, Dominica (fig. 47), one of Agostino Brunias’s larger and more complicated compositions, one arresting figure captivates the viewer more than any other. Pictured just right of centre, she commands the viewer’s attention, a towering vision all in white – from the gracefully flowing folds of her floor-length, frilly gown to the tall peak of her elegantly tied headdress. In addition to the figure’s brilliant whiteness, which includes the smooth alabaster of her face, modest décolleté, and delicate hands, she is made to stand out in the crowd of a busy Caribbean marketplace by the bright pink parasol that shades her from the sun. The sunshade is held aloft by a female attendant whose dark skin, like the umbrella, highlights the pale beauty of her mistress. In her essay ‘Taxonomy and Agency in Brunias’s West Indian Paintings’, Beth Fowkes Tobin analyses this scene, highlighting the presence of the figure in white by comparing her with two other women. In contrast to a ‘dramatically dressed mulatto woman’, Tobin describes the figure in question as an ‘elegantly attired white woman accompanied by a well-dressed African servant’.1 But is she? A white woman, that is. Tobin certainly believes in the figure’s unequivocal whiteness and lets her declaration of the woman’s race stand on its own, without qualification or complication. Her perception of the woman as white is particularly interesting given her treatment of Brunias’s paintings specifically as tools of t­­ axonomy, the science of placing objects, plants, animals, or, in this case, people into discrete and defined categories. I point to Tobin’s work here not because it is exceptional in its assessment of the taxonomic value of Brunias’s oeuvre but precisely because it offers the most thorough treatment of the conventional view of the artist’s interest in typology and the place of his work in the burgeoning natural history tradition of the eighteenth century, a perspective implicitly shared by the scores of writers in history, anthropology, and related fields who have used Brunias’s images, since the time of their creation, as documentary evidence of race and culture in the eighteenth-century Caribbean.2 Comparing his work to that of the artists who travelled with Captain Cook to the Pacific, Tobin notes that Brunias was commissioned to ‘record the



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

Agostino Brunias, Linen Market, Dominica, c. 1780, oil on canvas,

manners and customs of the inhabitants of a tropical region’ and confirms him among the rank and file of so-called natural history artists or ethnographic illustrators.3 While I certainly do not disagree that an undeniable ethnographic impulse motivated Brunias’s project, this sort of designation fails to appreciate the complexity of his work or the significant extent to which it differs from other work of the period typically classified in this way. Still, Tobin offers insightful observations about the place of natural history in eighteenth-century Western culture, its relationship to earlier traditions of travel writing, and its precursory role to formal anthropology that I find particularly useful for discussing Brunias’s West Indian pictures. She writes: Natural history, one of the eighteenth century’s great preoccupations, was a scientific discourse that encompassed what we now think of as botany, zoology, geology, geography, and anthropology. As part of the Enlightenment project to extend European systems of thought into unknown regions of the globe, it sought to describe, name, and classify every natural phenomenon that it encountered. As a genre of prose writing, natural history grew out of travel narratives. But the two genres are distinct. Travel writing is organized around a narrative framework as the traveler moves through space and time. Descriptions of what the traveler encounters – plants, animals, people, terrain – are contained within the narrative principle. Natural history, on the

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other hand, employs the list as its organizing principle … The natural history of the eighteenth century was heavily influenced by Linnaean systems of c­­ lassification that focused on the observable traits that a specimen displays on its surface.4

As the scope of the British Empire expanded to include an ever more diverse population under its dominion, Britons determined to shore up the boundaries of white identity, and I agree that Brunias’s work was absolutely meant to participate in this programme by visualising the increasingly important racial categories that structured the dynamics of power in the British world. Tobin understands Brunias’s work as the visual equivalent of ‘the customs-and-manners’ section of written natural histories and argues that, concerned with ‘typicality’ and sharing natural history’s attention to surface detail and classification, Brunias’s pictures function as a means of identifying types of people. One could use Brunias’s paintings to distinguish a planter from a slave by noting surface traits such as skin color, arrangement of hair, clothing, jewelry, and objects that the subjects hold in their hands or surround themselves with. Just as a birdwatcher uses a field guide to identify the bird he has just seen, so one could use Brunias’s pictures to identify a French mulatress or a Black Carib, for instance, and to distinguish each of these types from African slaves.5

I argue, however, that while Brunias’s paintings were meant to contribute to this natural history discourse and to the visualisation of social and racial classification in the Caribbean, in practice they potentially function in an entirely different and much more complicated way, troubling the categories they ostensibly visually define. Brunias’s paintings might have encouraged colonial West Indians to think in terms of race, helping to calcify developing notions of colonial racial identity – white Creole, negro, mulatress, red Carib and Black, etc.; however, they also gestured towards such assignments of identity as arbitrary and artificial. Furthermore, as this chapter will demonstrate, they absolutely do not work as field guides for identifying and categorising colonial West Indian humanity. Diverging from the natural history tradition that Tobin so deftly describes, Brunias’s paintings develop subjective narratives of interracial (and interclass) dramas in which categories are not fixed but fluid and race emerges not as a taxonomy of neat and discrete types but as a vexing continuum upon which one station shades almost imperceptibly into the next. The assessment of Brunias’s oeuvre as strictly ethnographic or taxonomic, along with the artist’s reputation as the ‘plantocracy’s painter’, has precluded the serious consideration of how his images frequently subvert the very racial categories they ostensibly worked uncomplicatedly to support. Brunias’s



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

­­ marketplaces, river scenes, and his two- and three-figure works that I call ‘racial studies’ confront the viewer with bodies that cannot, particularly by virtue of the vexing comparison they offer, so easily be identified; they potentially confound more than they explicate. In this chapter, I read Brunias’s work very differently from most other scholars, using his depiction of ambiguously raced women – those who cannot, based upon physical appearance, be securely identified as being white or of colour – to consider how the artist’s images, particularly interpreted within the context of the fraught status of white womanhood in the Caribbean, might be understood to challenge the idea of racial categories at the same time as they work to support them.6 Moreover, while the visual analysis in this chapter is limited to the consideration of this particular subset of Brunias’s work, the theoretical implications offered here aim to bring together the observations of the previous chapters, ultimately demonstrating that the artist’s images should not be understood as intent upon fixing racial identity in the late eighteenth-century New World as much as they should be valued as evidence of this crucially inchoate moment in the history of race. Classifying bodies, classifying Brunias: Brunias’s bodies vis-à-vis ethnographic art

Doing some classifying of their own, Tobin and others have generally described Brunias as a natural history illustrator or ethnographic artist, and, at least superficially, the label seems a fitting designation, as his work shares clear ideological affinities with the eighteenth-century natural history tradition that gave way to ethnography. The use of Brunias’s imagery to illustrate period texts such as Edwards’s History, civil and commercial, of the West Indies and his commission, in 1784, to complete a set of botanical drawings for the St Vincent Botanic Gardens seem to further confirm his credentials in this regard. Moreover, the tags on the back of the Brunias paintings at Harvard’s Peabody Museum remind us that Brunias’s apparent task was to create images ‘representing the People of different color in some of the Islands in the West Indies’, and the taxonomic titles given to the Peabody works, if not necessarily Brunias’s own designations, do reflect the way in which the artist’s oeuvre was understood at the time of its creation.7 This confirms the general validity of the type of titles that have been assigned to Brunias’s paintings by museums, galleries, and auction houses to this day, and demonstrates that, even at the time of their creation, viewers understood the images as part of the great Enlightenment project of cataloguing the natural world. European expansion into the so-called New World challenged natural historians with an unprecedented amount of new material to analyse and incorporate into their great catalogues. The Great Chain of Being insisted on a ‘static, timeless universe in which all natural phenomena could be located

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on a hierarchical grid’ and new species ‘did not evolve nor … suddenly emerge by way of mutation’.8 Thus, eighteenth-century observers worked to order the diverse variety of ‘new’ people found in the New World. Brunias, of course, focused particularly on these ‘exotic’ examples of New World humanity – Caribs, Indians who were strangely ‘black’, transplanted Africans who were constructed as the new indigenes, and – perhaps most interesting of all – people of combined European and African heritage who, relatively unknown, or, at least, rarely acknowledged in Europe, constituted a conspicuous population in the islands that was impossible to ignore. As Tobin insightfully asserts, the plantocracy had a vested interest in the Enlightenment insistence upon a world in which all categories of being were both fixed and timeless; such thinking ‘erased their participation in the slave trade as well as their culpability as slave owners, and it erased their role in the creation of the so-called mulatto race’.9 The artist’s focus on these novel and exotic (to Europeans anyway) ‘new’ races suggests an ideological affinity with the contemporaneous tradition of casta painting that persisted throughout eighteenth-century colonial New Spain and employed the Enlightenment interest in classification in order to ‘render visible and stable an increasingly fluid society’.10 In an effort to fix the seemingly infinite permutations and protean boundaries of the casta system into neat and discrete categories, casta painting emerged during the eighteenth century as a visual representation of New Spain’s system of racial castes.11 Primarily created in present-day Mexico and often intended for export to Spain, the paintings offered peninsular Spaniards a neat and orderly picture of a Spanish American society anchored by an easily discernible socio-racial hierarchy. Casta works were typically rendered in a series of fourteen to twenty separate canvases or copper plates (or occasionally as a single subdivided panel), each depicting an interracial family composed of father, mother, and one or two of their children (fig. 48). Each image was accompanied by a textual formula that at once explained and defined the racial mixture being represented, for example, De Español y Negra, Mulato (From Spaniard and black, mulatto). Moreover, particularly after the mid-eighteenth century, the racial taxonomy reified by casta paintings often reflected a social and economic hierarchy; family groups considered more racially desirable wear sumptuous costumes and harmoniously inhabit luxuriously furnished spaces, while more racially mixed, less desirable unions are represented in markedly diminished and sometimes discordant domestic circumstances.12 In addition to depicting the race mixing that was both a historical fact in the Americas and disproportionately informed the image of the New World in the European mind, casta works also included ‘objects, food products, flora, and fauna signifying the natural abundance of the Americas’.13



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

Jose de Alcibar (attributed to), De Español y Negra, Mulato (From Spaniard and black, mulatto), c. 1760

Brunias’s paintings, like the casta works of colonial Mexico, direct attention to racial difference and, in paying marked attention to the fashion culture of the islanders and its racial and social connotations as well as depicting quotidian ­­ activities such as those of the marketplace, Brunias’s paintings suggest a similar ethnographic eye. Furthermore, like the castas, several of Brunias’s works, such as those at the Peabody, were deposited in natural history and ethnological collections. However, despite their noted similarities, crucial differences prevent Brunias’s work from functioning like a British Caribbean incarnation of the casta tradition. For example, like most ethnographically oriented artwork, casta paintings include verbal descriptions that were crucial to their function. Their textual equations, expressing race in ‘A + B = C’ form, served a didactic function, teaching viewers to make sense of the figures before them. Moreover, by presenting interracial relationships as fruitful unions ostensibly sanctified by marriage, such images imposed legitimacy on liaisons that might otherwise have been viewed as illicit. Generally promoting the idea of unity and harmony in each individual painting and placing each interracial union within the hierarchy represented by the series as a whole, casta paintings neatly brought the appearance of order to a potentially disorderly colonial world.14

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Like casta paintings and ethnographic images in general, other colonial artwork that sought to make order of the ‘new’ peoples of the so-called New World typically depended on the use of text. Isaac Mendes Belisario’s ‘Creole Negroes’ (fig. 49), the final plate in Sketches of Character, provides a  useful West Indian example. Belisario uses an enumerated chart format, like a scientific textbook, to present human bodies, while the accompanying letterpress provides a labelled identity for each numbered bust as well as a lengthy description of the supposed attributes particular to each ‘specimen’. Given the important relationship of image and text in the ethnographic art tradition with which Brunias’s work has typically been associated, the conspicuous lack of text or racial formulas associated with his pictures and the ramifications of that lack deserve critical attention. While casta paintings incorporate identifying text into the images themselves, Brunias’s paintings bear no text whatsoever – typically not even original titles – to explain how to identify the diverse bodies that the viewer encounters. Thus,  the pictures compel viewers to draw their own conclusions about the identity of the figures and the dynamics of the scene at hand. This is a task far more complicated than it might initially sound, forcing the viewer to engage in a complex visual reckoning of race that requires the assessment of more than just complexion and often fails to produce an unequivocal ‘answer’ to the racial question. While casta images and Belisario’s Creole Negroes neatly divide New World human variety into discrete and discernible categories, Brunias’s bustling markets and crowded river scenes – ­­jumbles of multi-hued humanity with each brownish body shading fluidly into the next – trade in ambiguity. For the viewer of a Brunias picture, race, rather than being an indisputable fact to be discerned from a neatly organised chart or a truth to be empirically observed, is, quite literally, in the eye of the beholder. What does a white woman look like? Visuality and the crisis of racial representation

To my knowledge, Kay Dian Kriz is the only other scholar thus far who has alluded – albeit tangentially – to this nuanced way of reading Brunias’s work.15 In her scholarship on Brunias’s mulatresses, Kriz also turns her attention to the scene-stealing woman in white from Linen Market, Dominica: The skin of the woman in white is pointedly lighter than that of her dark-skinned servant, but not markedly different in hue from that of the mulatto woman on the left or the female figure standing at the right, holding a ­­vegetable … The central figure’s loose-fitting gown boasts more ruffles and lace than the skirt and blouse of the mulatta on the left; similarly she wears a highly elaborate white



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

Isaac Mendes Belisario, ‘Creole Negroes’, from Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica, 1837, lithograph with watercolour

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headdress, still recognizable as a turban but having little in common with the striped and checked kerchiefs that the women around her are wearing. Her hair lacks the tight curls marking Brunias’s other women of color, yet it is neither lighter in color nor more elaborately coiffed  … Based on  these observations one might ‘read’ the woman in white as white, and therefore as an exceptional figure within the artist’s oeuvre and within the physical space of a market that white women would have been unlikely to frequent. Is she or isn’t she? The uncertainty of this woman’s ‘race’ is surely one of the pleasures this figure offers its viewers.16

Where Tobin is so certain about the figure’s whiteness that she never questions it, Kriz, who describes the woman as ‘an exceptional figure within the artist’s oeuvre’ because of her racial ambiguity, devotes significant attention to deciphering what she perceives as the racial puzzle that the figure presents.17 That two such prominent and well-respected scholars can arrive at such different conclusions about the same figure indicates the deep and heretofore neglected complexity of Brunias’s representation of race in the West Indies. Although I agree with Kriz’s nuanced reading of the figure here and its larger implications for understanding Brunias’s work, I contend that such racially ambiguous figures are far from exceptional entities in the artist’s work, and further argue that his ambiguous rendering of racial identity potentially prompted as much anxiety as pleasure in its original audience, who would have been concerned about the ‘precariousness of whiteness as an absolute value in an island culture where … the psychic wholeness of the Anglo-European subject [was vulnerable]’.18 Particularly telling is the explicitly visual work that Kriz does in order to begin to decipher the racial codes operative in the picture, for example the attention she pays to the figure’s placement, her dress, her head wear, her hair, and, particularly her skin tone in comparison with other figures. Kriz’s assertion that the figure ‘might’ be ‘read’ as white is also illuminating, implicitly suggesting, of course, that although she ‘might be read’ as a white woman, she isn’t one. In contrast to Tobin’s unqualified assertion of the figure’s whiteness, Kriz acknowledges the ambiguity of the racial question; however, she simultaneously rhetorically constructs the figure as non-white, in effect giving her own answer to the ‘is she or isn’t she?’ debate. The legal scholar Eva Saks describes a similar rhetorical dilemma in a 1908 trial of racial determination, Jones v. State (Alabama), in which the defence objected to witness testimony that the woman whose whiteness was being challenged ‘looked like a white woman’, noting that: Perhaps the fact that she ‘looked like’ a white woman distanced her somewhat from being white, and by suggesting that her skin was not her identity but a representation of an identity, opened the door to the disturbing possibility of



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

misrepresentation – a forgery by nature? [But] If nature was forging, what was being forged?19

In other words, ambiguously raced bodies such as those studied by Saks and painted by Brunias threaten to reveal race not as an essential truth to be empirically observed but as a socially constructed identity sometimes a­­ rbitrarily assigned. In making her implicit case against the figure’s whiteness, Kriz offers fairly persuasive evidence, both historical and visual-contextual, to suggest that the figure is a person of mixed race.20 Interestingly, however, what one might assume to be a compelling piece of visual evidence supporting Kriz’s implicit claim of the woman’s mixed-race identity – the figure’s complexion in comparison with the two more obviously mixed-race women – does not hold up when viewing the painting in person. Comparing the woman’s white skin with the whiteness of her dress underscores her paleness, a significant fact considering that, in other works such as Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing (fig. 35), Brunias used the comparison of fabric against flesh to underscore how not-white a figure was. Despite Kriz’s assertion that she is ‘not markedly different in hue’ from the two other women, I would argue that she is, in fact, decidedly paler than the two darker ladies. I might add, however, that neither does this woman evince any sign of the proverbial bloom of the English rose in her cheeks… The ellipses at the end of the previous paragraph signal the potential of this game of racial reasoning to go on ad infinitum. Although images such as the casta paintings and Belisario’s ‘Creole Negroes’ presented racial reading as a science that might be mastered with the proper field guide, classifying bodies is not like classifying birds. Moreover, as Kriz’s unpacking of the figure in white reveals, determining racial identity is a fundamentally visual exercise; however, though our understanding of race is rooted in the visual assessment of the body and our expression of it is conveyed in visual terms, ultimately racial assignment is largely contextually contingent, depending upon so much more than the reading of the body itself. The fundamental irony of race – that it is both visually insistent and visually elusive – becomes markedly apparent in attempts to visually interrogate the boundaries of whiteness, an exercise in which Brunias’s paintings are clearly implicated. As Angela Rosenthal, following Richard Dyer among others, has astutely observed, whereas black has conventionally signified the immediately recognisable ‘raced’ deviation, whiteness exists as the unmarked standard whose ‘qualities only emerge in contrast to, or in comparison with, that which it is not’.21 Rosenthal explores the visual history and the limits of this comparison, tracing pictorial shifts in the legibility of whiteness in British portraiture from images of seventeenth-century aristocratic women whose

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whiteness was amplified in contrast to the blackness of their attendants to late eighteenth-century portraits in which whiteness attempts to stand for itself, integrally marked by pale, apparently translucent skins that are underscored by what can best be described as a hyperbolic blush. This new trend towards blushing beauties emerged, Rosenthal contends, not in response to changes in aesthetic tastes but as the product of cultural anxieties born of the British colonial project and the subsequent blurring of the boundaries of Englishness. The inability of the body – and specifically the elite white body – to stand for its racial self prompted increasing anxiety for Britons in the latter decades of the eighteenth century. In particular, mounting abolitionist pressure and a growing population of black immigrants to the British Isles during this period provoked doubts about ‘the primacy of a self-sufficient white subject’.22 In response, Rosenthal asserts that the white female body, with its exaggeratedly rosy cheeks highlighting its pale skin, emerged as ‘a marker of ideal selfhood and nationhood’.23 Thus, Brunias’s figures such as the woman in white from Linen Market, Dominica presented a potentially vexing visual problem for the viewer. Without the telltale blush or stark contrast of black and white – only a confounding sea of diverse shades along the spectrum of brown – the women in Brunias’s paintings insistently refuse to make their whiteness – or its lack  – clearly legible. Physical embodiments of an epistemological conundrum, ambiguously raced bodies like these threaten to upend the whole scheme of race, first by exposing racial categories as social constructions rather than scientific facts, and then by revealing the unstable ground upon which these powerfully real fictions are constructed. Although concerned with the history of racial determination in the law, Saks’s work does much to untangle the conundrum that both Tobin and Kriz encounter through the figure of the woman in white, pointing to the dilemmas of determining and describing race. As she so deftly asserts: ‘to substantiate what is neither a mimetic description nor a tangible entity but instead a semiotic figure, is impossible’.24 In her study of the ‘crisis of representation’ involved in describing race, Saks concerns herself primarily with the problematics of the ‘discourse of blood’ that defined racial rhetoric in the nineteenth century. She highlights the rhetorical dilemmas posed by ambiguously raced bodies and demonstrates how the legal system found itself at a loss for words, groping for language to describe a person when the colour of their body did not match the alleged ‘colour’ (i.e. race) of their blood. The root of the representational crisis that Saks explores is ultimately a disjuncture between the visual and the verbal, between ‘looking white’ and ‘being white’. However, Saks focuses primarily on the linguistic part of the racial equation and the problems it poses for legal definitions of race.



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

Considering this disjuncture from the visual side, I concentrate on what I call Brunias’s ‘racial studies’ – small canvases typically featuring two or three figures that compel the viewer to untangle the puzzle of the figures’ races and their relationship to one another. I want to think about how the artist’s images reveal the flaws in the visual foundation of racial knowledge and to consider how they might have offered a subtle counter-text to the construction of racial whiteness in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean. Thinking about this implication in relation to Brunias’s paintings, the inchoate construction of racial categories during the latter decades of the eighteenth century, and, in particular, the fraught state of white female identity in the colonial Caribbean at that time, figures such as the woman in white become all the more provocative in terms of the disjuncture between ‘looking like’ and ‘being’, for stuck in a racial limbo dictated by the material limits of painting, ‘looking white’ is the most that they can ever do. Visual manifestations of the representational crisis that Saks describes, Brunias’s ambiguously raced figures embody the fundamental conundrum of racial identity as a construction inextricably rooted in visual knowledge but incapable of being sustained by it. More than 200 years before critical race theorists in the academy proclaimed race a social construction, Brunias asserted as much on canvas. In response to Eva Saks’s flippantly posed ­­rhetorical question: ‘What does a white woman look like?’,25 Brunias posits, in paint, a witty reply: ‘Often, a white woman looks like a mulatress … and vice versa.’ Can you find the white woman in this picture? Reading race in Brunias’s racial studies

A survey of Brunias’s extant works reveals a number of ‘stock characters’ who appear, virtually unaltered save perhaps for a slight variation of costume or subtle modification of pose, in composition after composition. For example, the elegantly dressed figure Ma Commêre (fig. 50), possibly a preparatory sketch by Brunias, appears in at least three paintings – West Indian Creole Woman, with her Black Servant (fig. 51; formerly known as A Lady Attended by a Negro Servant), Market Day, Roseau, Dominica (fig. 52), and Mulatto Women on the Banks of the River Roseau, Dominica which also includes the three figures from Free West Indian Creoles in Elegant Dress (fig. 53) in virtually identical form as its central group. Brunias’s reuse of the same figures in multiple paintings has generally lent credence to the association of his work with racial typology, with these figures being understood as representative of racial types, so generic as to be transportable from one painting to another with only superficial changes, if any. However, in my view, Brunias, painting against the grain

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50

Agostino Brunias, Ma Commêre, n.d.

of his ostensible ­­ commission, playfully employs the same figures repeatedly in order to confound rather than clarify the question of racial typology for the viewer. Rather than illustrating a particular ‘type’ in work after work, the same protean figures appear in multiple contexts, performing different roles in each and rendering the so-called ‘real’ identity of such figures all the more ambiguous. Similarly, Brunias recycles the same visual cues with regard to dress and accessories from work to work, creating curious conjunctions of colour and costume that potentially confuse the viewer’s assessment ­­



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

Agostino Brunias, West Indian Creole Woman, with her Black Servant, c. 1780, oil on canvas

of a figure’s status. Is the figure free or enslaved? Do the clothing and ­­accessories constitute a display of actual wealth or merely a display of airs? For example, the ­­dark-skinned ‘dandy’ in Free West Indian Dominicans (fig. 18; previously known as A West Indian Dandy and Two Ladies) wears the same ensemble, except for a difference in head covering, as a decidedly paler man in the ­­margins on the right of Handkerchief Dance on the Island of Dominica (fig. 28).

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Agostino Brunias, Market Day, Roseau, Dominica, c. 1780, oil on canvas

While the matter is certainly arguable, given the contexts of both p ­­ aintings, it is probably fair to speculate that Brunias intended both figures to represent free men of colour. However, the vast difference in their skin tones – on either end of the flesh-coloured spectrum – underscores that nothing intrinsic to the body proclaimed this status, and in a colonial world that depended, at least prescriptively, on fixed boundaries between black and white, enslaved and free, the implication that a change of clothes made all the difference was certainly a scary one. While ambiguity could, as Kriz suggests, be a source of visual pleasure in a painting, it also constituted a very real source of potential anxiety, and Brunias’s paintings add a racial dimension to eighteenth-century British concerns about policing social class. These concerns took on even greater significance in the Americas, which lacked a historical landed aristocracy to anchor distinctions of social class as in Britain, and where colonial mercantilism meant that everyone devoted a relatively high percentage of their income to buying the sort of finished goods that, in Europe, had conventionally signified a person’s status. Therefore, in the New World, even more so than in Britain, appearances could be deceiving – ­­ and were powerful precisely for this reason. The fascinating work of scholars Shane White and Graham White has demonstrated ­­



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

Agostino Brunias, Free West Indian Creoles in Elegant Dress, c. 1780, oil on canvas

how keenly whites observed what the people of colour around them were wearing, particularly those whose bodies they legally owned.26 Indeed, Mrs A. C. Carmichael devotes an entire chapter of her account of the five years she spent in the West Indies to black dress, and frequently comments on the fashion of the enslaved and free coloured population elsewhere throughout the text. Carmichael’s description of the dress of enslaved black people during plantation Christmas festivities merits quoting at length.

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She carefully notes the adoption, by people of African descent, of fashions ­­typically associated with elite whites: I have seen an estate negro in St. Vincent, dressed at Christmas time, as well in every respect as any gentleman could be; and he was a slave whose master was, and had long been absent: he told me every thing he wore was of his own purchasing: he had a quizzing glass, and as good a hat as any white man in the colony; he had a watch ribbon and key … As for the women, I hardly know how to describe their gala dresses, they are so various … They have fine worked muslin gowns, with handsome flounces; satin and sarsenet bodices are very common; their under garments are of the best materials; and they have good cotton or silk stockings; their kid dancing shoes are often of the gayest colours; while their expensive turbans are adjusted with a grace, that makes the dress really appear elegant … The real value of their jewellery is considerable; it consists of massy gold ear-rings and rings upon their finger. Coral necklaces and handsome gold chains, lockets, and other ornaments of this description.27

Carmichael’s words here offer only a brief glimpse of the deep anxieties that white settlers in the island colonies must have felt upon seeing the luxury items that they apparently assumed should be reserved for themselves in the possession of enslaved Africans and free people of colour. Planters and their advocates, including Carmichael, could and did point to their finely dressed slaves as an indicator of the benefits of slavery; having had all their necessities provided for them, enslaved black people could use the pocket money earned from their provision grounds and huckstering to afford luxuries that the working poor in England could scarcely imagine. However, white observers just as frequently spoke with disdain about the conspicuous consumption of people of African descent and the false sense of entitlement it encouraged. In a telling anecdote, Carmichael observes a ‘coloured domestic female slave, who would not demean herself by wearing anything so vulgar, and, as she [the coloured woman] expressed it, “unlike a lady,” as cotton stockings, and she regularly walked out with white silk ones’.28 Embodied in Brunias’s finely dressed, ambiguously raced figures with their seemingly white faces and elegant ensembles was the potential to push colonial anxieties about the conspicuous consumption of the coloured population to its ultimate implications. Island society could, in effect, be understood as one perpetual masquerade party, drawing all the same sorts of criticisms that Aileen Ribeiro has noted in her work on eighteenth-century masquerade in England, particularly the indiscriminate mingling of people of unequal status with the effect of rendering such status distinctions indistinguishable save, perhaps, for the fact that those with the least position were invariably more finely



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

attired. A 1755 commentator’s description of a masquerade ball might just have easily described British perceptions of the West Indies: ‘Hence our very footmen are adorned with gold and silver, with bags, toupees and ruffles; the valet de chambre cannot be distinguished from his master, but by being better dressed.’29 The expression of such anxieties regarding dress and personal adornment indicates the extent to which the consumer items that had played an integral role in constructing and performing elite white identity in Britain could not function in the same way in the empire’s island colonies. Of course, it is impossible to know if Brunias consciously understood race to be a social construction or recognised the ‘crisis of representation’ that the ambiguously raced bodies he painted posed to solidifying schemes of racial classification; however, the artist clearly perceived racial representation as a visual puzzle and exhibited a keen interest in probing it throughout his career in the Caribbean. I want to return for a moment to the woman in white from Linen Market, Dominica who appears virtually unchanged in appearance, though in very different circumstances, in at least two other paintings by Brunias. Highlighted by the bright pink parasol shading her pale skin from the tropical sun, in Linen Market, Dominica she reigns over the crowd as the undisputed star of the show, and her prominence in the painting combined with her white complexion convinces Tobin of her racial whiteness; so much so, in fact, that Tobin does not even acknowledge, much less entertain, any other possibility. However, in the visually stunning and fabulously complex river scene, View of Roseau Valley, Island of Dominica, Showing Africans, Carib Indians, and Creole Planters (fig. 54), another woman steals the scene – and the parasol – from this figure. Underneath the canopy of an umbrella held by a colourfully dressed and considerably smaller black woman standing just behind her, this ‘scene-stealer’, also robed completely in white (with pink underskirt), towers over our former star who walks by the woman’s side – now more understudy than leading lady and looking less like the mistress and more like the help. The scene-stealer’s tall straw hat, adorned with a voluminous white veil, outshines the elegantly wrapped headdress of our former star, and the triple layer of sun protection – parasol, hat, and veil – fervently proclaims the figure’s whiteness in relation to the still pale companion who stands just outside the umbrella’s shade. Perhaps it makes this declaration a little too fervently, however, over-compensating for a need that isn’t really there. Deirdre Coleman has documented the great lengths to which British women living in the West Indies went to protect both their complexions and – not unrelatedly – their reputations.30 In fact, both to retain (or, significantly, to recover) their pale visages and to safeguard their reputations as  wellmannered ladies, many British girls living in the Caribbean were sent back to Europe around the onset of adolescence, and those who did remain in

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the ‘torrid zones’ used various means, including bonnets, veils, parasols, and even masks – a controversial custom reputedly adopted from  mixedrace women  – to safeguard their precious white skins and to cultivate an ‘unnatural lily-white pallor’ that, perhaps counter-productively, actually distinguished them from their European countrywomen. Janet Schaw, a Scottish visitor to the West Indies in the mid-1770s, describes such practices of Creole women with amused fascination and at times none-too-subtle distaste. Upon seeing a friend’s face unveiled for the first time during her Caribbean sojourn, the woman’s ghostly white visage causes Schaw to lament that, although her friend was as ‘beautiful as ever’, unfortunately ‘the lily has far got the better of the rose’.31 In contrast to eighteenth-century British portraits that, as Rosenthal observes, signal the socio-racial identities of their aristocratic female sitters through a hyperbolic blush, white island Creoles cultivated a pallor best described as pathologically pale, a fact documented by pictures such as this one that depict pale-skinned women shielded by multiple layers of sun protection – parasols, hats, and elaborate veils. Whether the women in Brunias’s pictures are meant to represent white women or light-skinned women of African descent remains in the eye of the beholder. A letter in the Brunias clippings file at Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art captures the ambiguities of the women’s racial identities

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Agostino Brunias, View of Roseau Valley, Island of Dominica, Showing Africans, Carib Indians, and Creole Planters, mid-late eighteenth century



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

perfectly. Responding to a query about the painting by then-curator Cynthia Wayne, Alissandra Cummins, the director of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, wrote: [a] fascinating aspect of the painting in [sic] the fact that it is listed as a ‘group of planters’ who observe the scene while passing on a nearby path … I am amazed by the sight of delicately bred creole ‘ladies’ gazing apparently unaffected upon such a scene of partially nude women. This would have been beyond the realms of possibility especially in the company of a gentleman. There is one other possibility that these ‘ladies’ were in fact free women of colour, mulattoes – but I would need a colour photograph of the work in order to clarify this.32

Having viewed the work in person, I can attest to the fact that seeing it in colour does little to clarify the question of the women’s racial identities. Clearly, in the game of racial reckoning presented by this picture, our new leading lady is the fairest of them all. But is she white? Moreover, if the figure is meant to be ‘white’, what exactly does that mean? Less interesting than the small but significant differences between the two ‘ladies’ – and I use the racially fraught term ‘ladies’ decidedly, for reasons that will become clear in a moment – are substantial similarities that imply an inextricable connection between them. They may even be sisters, but how exactly are they related? Whether they are two white women, a white woman and a mulatress, or even two mulatresses remains a mystery. Fused at the hip such that the cascading skirts of their virtually identical frilly gowns seem to flow together, the figures form a closed group, conjoined twins who share a single fan-wielding arm between them. On either side of this shared appendage, their bodies, with arms akimbo and heads cocked in opposite directions, mirror one another. If they are, as the slight differences in their costumes and positioning might be read to suggest, white woman and mulatress (at least in this image) – a question that, as I will argue in a moment, has no ‘real’ answer – they are more alike than different. Sharing more than what separates them, they are, in fact, so close that the boundary between them, the line – perhaps – between white and non-white, is literally imperceptible, thin as the slip of silk in the pleated fan between them. The idea, dramatised in many of Brunias’s paintings, of a flimsy and perhaps vacillating frontier between black and white informed anxieties about the potential impeachability of white identity among Britons in the Caribbean colonies, especially for women whose bodies functioned as symbols for a very particularly raced and gendered national ideal. The observations of the colonial commentator Edward Long demonstrate the particularly cutting charges of ‘creole degeneracy’ directed towards white women: ‘We may see, in some of these places, a very fine young woman aukwardly [sic] dangling her arms

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with the air of a Negroe-servant, lolling almost the whole day upon beds or settees, her head muffled up with two or three handkerchiefs, her dress loose, and without stays.’33 Set in the West Indies, Samuel Jackson Pratt’s comedic drama The New Cosmetic, or, the Triumph of Beauty (1790; written under the pseudonym C. Melmonth, Esq.) also offers a telling gendered example of the instability of white racial identity and its relationship to visuality. The play follows the trials of Louisa, an Englishwoman once revered for her fair beauty, who has been cast aside by her beau because, darkened by exposure to the Caribbean sun, she is fair no more. Louisa’s newly dusky complexion renders her not only unattractive to her former paramour but, it seems, un-white as well. Indicating that this plight is not particular to Louisa, a white male character in the play describes his fleeting love for a girl in similar circumstances: ‘I loved the girl once, when she was white, but never thought of her after she became a Mulatto.’34 Louisa does eventually win back her lover (through the application of a cosmetic that restores her whiteness); however, more significant for the purposes of this discussion than her restored whiteness is the possibility that she could ‘become’ not white in the first place. Citing the fraught perception of white women in the islands, Kriz has argued that Brunias shied away from painting women ‘who could securely be identified as white creole or European’, opting to paint mulatresses instead.35 While I certainly agree that imaging the white female body in colonial Caribbean space was a contentious enterprise and that this must have informed Brunias’s decision to feature mixed-race women in so many of his images, I would argue that doing so signified more than just a convenient way to circumvent the problem of picturing the white female West Indian body. Brunias’s paintings do evince an undeniable interest in the readily identifiable mulatress (i.e. the woman who is obviously of mixed black and European heritage); however, the reality that the artist never painted a woman who could be ‘securely identified’ as white does not necessarily mean that all of the paler-skinned beauties in his pictures were or should be unequivocally defined as mixed race. Brunias was clearly intrigued by the epistemological dilemma presented by the ambiguously raced body, and the impossibility of ever ‘securely’ identifying some of the figures in his paintings as white or not-white dramatised colonial anxieties about the potential impeachability of whiteness. Therefore, I would argue that Brunias’s paintings of mixed-race and, especially, ambiguously raced women underscore rather than evade the issues of identity that made picturing the white female body in the colonial world such a contentious enterprise, bringing to the fore the reality of interracial sex and embodying anxieties about the potential of passing, racial ‘contamination’, and the murky boundaries of white identity, especially for white women in the West Indies. As the white man who literally rides the black woman on the opposite side of this painting reminds us, Brunias possessed both a sophisticated ­­perception



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

of colonial dynamics of power and a wicked, witty sense of humour, and these could combine to produce subtle but powerful critiques of plantocratic society and identity.36 Viewed collectively rather than in isolation, Brunias’s paintings of ambiguously raced women – who, depending on context, might be read as white or not-quite-white – suggest a meditation on the role of visual perception in discerning racial and social status. Working out in paint the visual puzzle of race, these images question what it means to be ‘white’ and offer a critique of the late eighteenth-century concern for racial categorisation in general.37 In Brunias’s paintings, as in life, the viewer’s assessment of a figure’s race may shift depending upon context, a fact that the artist demonstrates through his use of the same figures over and over again. Far from depicting static racial ‘types’, Brunias’s use of repetition demonstrates the protean nature of race and makes whiteness a feature impossible to pin down. The same figure who seems ‘certainly’ white in one picture is maybe mulatto in another, and is simply impossible to classify in yet a third. Moreover, the fact that Brunias’s paintings were probably sold in sets and small groups suggests that this was an intentional effect rather than a coincidental one. In 1983 Christie’s offered a group of Brunias paintings at an auction of ‘Important English Pictures’. Included among these was a work that the auction house referred to as Two Ladies Attended by a Negro Servant (fig. 55; hereafter Two Ladies). These ‘ladies’ are the same figures who appear promenading in the right corner of the river scene. In the world of eighteenthcentury painting, the term ‘lady’, in the absence of any qualifiers, referred exclusively to free, well-to-do, white women. Therefore, the title in the auction catalogue not only implies that both pale-skinned women are of equal social status, but also that both are equally, unquestionably white. While it is impossible to know for certain which work Brunias created first, Two Ladies may have served as a focused study for the depiction of the same figures in the larger, more compositionally complicated view of the Roseau River valley. However, the work clearly stands on its own. In fact, I find the grouping of the three women – two fair and one dark – in the smaller canvas even more fascinating. In contrast to the river scene in which the women, exiled to a far corner of the work, compete with roughly thirty other figures for the viewer’s attention, Two Ladies is clearly all about them and the relationship between them, a fact underscored by slight but significant changes in the composition of the work. To be sure, the towering figure in the centre still commands the scene. Whereas the faces of the two fair women in the river tableau looked out in opposite directions, here the gaze of the woman to the left (the ‘fallen star’ of the river scene who had commanded the attention in Linen Market, Dominica) focuses on the central figure, working to direct the viewer’s attention to her as well. The adoration evident in her eyes as she looks upon the other woman recalls that of the previously discussed

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55

Agostino Brunias, Two Ladies Attended by a Negro Servant, n.d.

black ­­attendants in portraits of elite white female sitters, casting her into a ­­subordinate role that calls Christie’s assessment of the woman’s race and status into question. However, whereas the dark complexions of black attendants typically amplify the whiteness of the mistress’s skin, the pale beauty of this figure calls her maybe-mistress’s whiteness into question. The Mona Lisa



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

smile of this central figure (who also certainly qualifies as a Vixen according to the ­­definition offered in the previous chapter), which is absent from the larger painting, directly engages her audience, guiding their attention. She meets the viewer’s gaze with a sideways glance and a knowing, almost flirtatious smirk that suggests that she has a secret to which they would like to be privy – ­­perhaps the answer to the question: ‘Is she, or isn’t she?’ Importantly, even if we venture the assumption that the woman on the left is not white, an assumption that we might base upon her slightly less elaborate dress, including the suggestive headwrap generally associated with women of colour and her somewhat subordinate position, it does not necessarily follow that the other woman is white. She is no fairer than her companion; indeed, the tree in the margin of the painting seems to cast a shadow on her face that, in conjunction with her thick brow, makes her appear marginally darker. And though her nose and chin may be sharper than those of the woman on the left, they are no ‘finer’ than those of the obviously mixed-race planter’s wife in A Planter and his Wife (fig. 1). Even greater doubt is cast upon the whiteness of this figure when the painting is compared to A Lady and a Mulatress with a Negro Servant Standing in Back (fig. 56), which, also for sale at the same Christie’s auction, had been part of the same private collection and was possibly originally intended as a companion work.38 In this outdoor scene, two women – one fair, one discernibly dusky – sit facing one another. Between them a dark-skinned woman stands slightly aback, a ewer poised in one hand, ready to fill the two stemmed glasses on the tray that she holds in the other. Again, the fairer woman, who one presumes is the ‘lady’ in Christie’s description of the scenario, is dressed primarily in white, and like the central woman from the river view and Two Ladies, she holds a delicate fan that acts as a physical divider separating her from her companion. Of the two women’s outfits, her ensemble is the more refined, with neckerchief and laced bodice that cinches her waist and renders her posture straighter than her darker partner’s, though still, it should be noted, with a perceptible slouch accented by the loosened laces at her hips and unbefitting a ‘true’ lady. She wears an elaborate, lacy headdress, a unique design that seems itself a crossbreed – part European bonnet, part African headdress. Although her skin is white, her features are ambiguous; her jaw and nose, like her face, are soft and round, and her hair, though more frizzy than ‘nappy’, is decidedly not smooth and straight. In fact, while her costume connects her to the role played by the fairer woman from the river view and Two Ladies, facially she bears a greater resemblance to the maybe-mulatress, the ‘fallen star’ of Linen Market, Dominica, and one certainly wonders what well-bred white lady would keep the company of a coloured woman, particularly one with such crude carriage. The pale woman’s darker companion lacks her refined, elegant style in either dress or posture. She slouches against the back of her chair in a loose,

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56

Agostino Brunias, A Lady and a Mulatress with a Negro Servant Standing in Back, n.d.

open bodice, her arm draped casually across the back of the chair, the outline of her splayed knees visible beneath her long, striped skirt. She is linked ­­visually to the negress standing at the back by the very similar way in which their headties are wrapped, the nearly identical silhouettes of their clothing,



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

Agostino Brunias, Creole Woman and Servants, c. 1770–80, oil on canvas, 30.5 x 22.9 cm

and the likeness of their postures – both with right arm held upwards and bent at the elbow, left arm more extended. Although one woman is the servant and the other the beneficiary of her service, Brunias connects them visually, demonstrating that, despite the difference in their status, united by their

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African heritage they are not so different from each other. But what of their relationship to the ‘white’ woman in this picture? In an interesting departure from the composition of the river scene and Two Ladies, in this picture the dark-skinned black woman replaces the fairest woman as the physically central figure, and she may be the key to unlocking the puzzle of the figures’ relationships to one another. She holds the tray at the level of her bosom, the round bulbs of the glasses she is preparing to fill like two surrogate breasts, suggesting that both women have received succour at the same dark teat and inviting two equally provocative interpretations. On the one hand, the two women can be read as sisters, daughters of the same dark mother, one of whom, either by virtue of a different father or simply a roll of the genetic dice, appears more phenotypically Caucasian than the other. The way in which Brunias positions the two women facing each other, like mirror images sitting in their chairs with the stripes of their wide skirts spread across their knees, supports such an interpretation. On the other hand, the visual suggestion that the fair-skinned woman has nursed at a dark bosom does not necessarily imply that she is not racially white; it does, however, call the character of her whiteness into question, even if she has no African ancestry. The controversial use of black and mixed-race wet nurses to nourish white babies exacerbated apprehensions about the compromised state of white identity and particularly white womanhood in the Caribbean.39 Edward Long, whose concerns about the potential detrimental effects that proximity to black people would have upon the gentility of white women have already been noted, decried the practice of giving up white babies to suckle at the breasts of black and brown mothers as ‘shameful and savage’.40 He did acknowledge that the custom of using wet nurses had been fashionable in England, but found considerably more fault with the borrowed breasts of Caribbean women of colour than with those of the white wives of English labourers. Because Long charged all women of colour with wanton harlotry, he likened the practice of sending white Creole children to be nursed by them to sending one’s babies ‘to suckle in any of the brothels in London’.41 According to him, white Creole mothers would engage ‘a Negroe or Mulatto wet nurse without reflecting that her blood may be corrupted, or considering the influence which the milk may have with respect to the disposition, as well as the health, of their little ones’.42 Although Long did not go so far as to suggest that the intrinsic racial whiteness of Creole Britons could be compromised by their sojourn in the torrid zones, and, in fact, contorted his own arguments to assert the opposite, his writing certainly suggested that their cultural whiteness was in jeopardy.43 If one reads the woman in the elaborate lace bonnet/headwrap as racially white, Brunias’s painting can be interpreted as a visual manifestation of Long’s concerns about the imperilled state of white ladydom in the West Indian colonies; this potential decline can be observed in the loosening of



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

the pale woman’s stays at the hips, allowing for the subtle slouch that begins to mimic her mulatto companion’s, and the colourful stripe in her skirt – an addition of colour to an ensemble that, in the two similar images previously discussed, was once pristinely white. Thus, while both Two Ladies and A Lady and a Mulatress use visual cues to create a puzzle of racial assignment, the latter painting questions not only its legibility but also its significance, suggesting that, even if the figure in question is racially white, there is still little difference between her and her duskier companion. Brunias’s painting acknowledges visual differences among people but forces the viewer to question whether these differences fundamentally mean anything or whether they are made to mean something, hinting at white racial superiority as the socially constructed fantasy at the crux of plantocratic identity. ‘Ceci n’est-ce pas une femme blanche’: race as representation

It was not by happenstance that Eva Saks used the language of art to describe the fundamental epistemological conundrum of race, referring to an ambiguously raced body as a ‘forgery by nature’.44 Artists who aim to convince the viewer with their ‘realistic’ renderings must be stellar illusionists, and nearly every naturalistic portrait participates in a game of trompe l’œil, striving to persuade the viewer of its semblance to an almost always absent referent, that is, to convince the viewer that it faithfully replicates one whom the viewer has never actually seen. Saks’s provocative question, ‘If nature was forging, what was being forged?’, underscores that race exists only at the level of representation. Therefore, perhaps the most interesting element of Brunias’s visual meditation on the constructedness and artificiality of racial assignment is the medium in which the artist conveys it. The Linnaean system that was so influential in the eighteenth century, and especially in nascent ideas about racial categorisation, relied heavily on attention to the details of the surface, but, by their very nature, ambiguously raced bodies such as those that fascinated Brunias might have compelled Britons to consider whether race was only skin deep, as well as the possibility that the surface could lie. There is, of course, no ‘real’ answer to the racial identity of Brunias’s painted figures. Creations of pigment and canvas, with no life or history outside the boundaries of the frame, they exist as representations only. Manifestations of an irony that both avoids and amplifies the potential disjuncture between ‘looking like’ and ‘being’ that defines the representational crisis that ambiguous bodies signify, Brunias’s figures can only ‘look like’; they can never ‘be’. Presaging René Magritte’s Treachery of Images, Archibald J.  Motley, Jr’s ­­‘scientific’ race portraits of the 1920s, performance theory, and the social ­constructionists – albeit probably unintentionally – Brunias’s pictures declare, ‘Ceci n’est pas une femme blanche’, but do so in a way that also forces the viewer

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to question – on a number of levels – ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est, une femme blanche?’ They raise the questions: What is a white woman? Who is a white woman? How is one a white woman and what does it mean to be one? Offering an eighteenth-century visual rendition of Butlerian ideas about identity and performance, Brunias’s racial studies compel the viewer to consider the possibility that ‘race’ does not exist beyond the level of representation in the sense that the appellation ‘white woman’ – even when referring to an actual, flesh and blood, pale-skinned body rather than a painted one – signifies more than it describes, forcing the body to become representative of a particular concept or set of ideas that it simultaneously performs and produces.45 Loaded with implications larger than the compromised state of white womanhood in Britain’s West Indian colonial empire, while the blushing beauties of British portraiture aimed to shore up the boundaries of white identity, Brunias’s ambiguously raced ones revealed the artificiality and potential instability of these boundaries by exposing instances in which race amounts to a crisis of representation, instances in which seeing may, in fact, be deceiving, the viewer cannot necessarily believe her or his eyes, and race – far from an empirically observable fact – can only ever be in the eye of the beholder. For the twenty-first-century viewer, Brunias’s racial studies can be understood as visually contesting the notion, dominant during his own time, that life might be ordered and classified through the reading of surfaces. More than any other subgroup of Brunias’s work, these pictures challenge the conventional perception of his paintings as visual field guides that demystified the racial and social order of the colonial West Indies, and thinking about his oeuvre outside of this narrow understanding opens up the possibility for the type of fresh, nuanced interpretations that I have endeavoured to offer throughout this book. On the surface, Brunias’s Caribbean paintings work to undergird inchoate systems of racial categorisation born of the Enlightenment obsession with objectivity, empiricism, and order; however, careful looking reveals such categories as powerful fictions at the foundation of the plantocratic regime. Ultimately, the artist’s project to paint the ‘People of different color in the West Indies’ yielded a body of work that can be understood as both chronicling and questioning the construction of racial identities in the British Caribbean, offering a genuinely unique vision with – if I may be so bold as to echo, with a significant revision, the writer of the Yale memo – very, very major implications for the study of race in the art and visual culture of the British Empire. Notes 1 Tobin could be referring either to the coquettish figure in the blue and white headdress capped with a straw hat or the lovely lady in the red and white headwrap and



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

low-laced bodice holding the gourd fruit. Poised on either side of the picture, they bookend the dramatically dressed woman in white who is just off centre. 2 Virtually since the time of their creation, Brunias’s images have been reproduced as generic illustrations of Caribbean life and culture by far too many popular publications, textbooks, and scholarly works to list here. As will be taken up in the coda, as early as 1791 Moreau de Saint-Méry used Brunias’s images to illustrate  the customs and manners of people of African descent in St Domingue (despite the fact that his work did not represent that island nor have anything to do with it). 3 Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, p. 140. 4 Ibid., p. 145; emphasis added. Parts of the natural history tradition date back to antiquity, and the real distinction Tobin may be getting at here is the emphasis on Linnaean-type classification as integral to the natural history description. My thanks go to Werner Sollors for this observation. 5 Ibid., p. 146. 6 As Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has brilliantly demonstrated, the understanding of race as an artificial social construction does not diminish its very real and incalculable impact on lived experience; see Higginbotham, ‘African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race’, Signs, 17.2 (1992), pp. 251–274. 7 This wording from the tags on the back of the four extant Peabody Brunias paintings also appears verbatim in the record of John Gardiner’s gift of the works that is preserved in the manuscript minutes of the Meeting of the President and Fellows of Harvard College on 15 November 1790, thus proving that the artist’s paintings were thought of in this ethnographic vein at the time of their creation. A photocopy of the minutes is in the Brunias clippings file at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. 8 Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, p. 146. 9 Ibid., p. 147. 10 Ilona Katzew, New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America (New York: Americas Society Art Gallery, 1996), p. 15. 11 Like the racial identities it attempts to describe visually, casta painting is extremely difficult to discuss in generalities. Subtle differences across the genre bring into relief how conceptions of racial and social identity – and the connection between them – contained intrinsic contradictions and changed over time. Ilona Katzew and other scholars have done much to explore the rich complexities, contradictions, and nuances regarding the construction of racial and social identity in New Spain expressed in and through casta painting. 12 See, for example, figures 48, 51, 109, 120, 130, 169, and 181 in Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). These observations may be more true of particular casta sets, including those by Francisco Clapera and Miguel Cabrera, than descriptive of the genre as a whole. 13 Katzew, New World Orders, p. 21. 14 As suggested earlier, not every casta image presented a picture of domestic ­­harmony; some, in fact, depict domestic violence. Seen in the context of their

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respective series, however, even those images that show discord would have conveyed a sense of socio-racial order and hierarchy. 15 Although not related to this discussion of racial assignment and Brunias’s paintings, Charmaine A. Nelson offers an interesting analysis of this work and its staging of the ‘complex sexual dance between white men, white women, and black women’ in which she argues that it is not the central woman in white who is the focus of her male companion’s attention, but the backside of the dark-skinned woman bending over produce for sale in the right-hand corner of the picture. Nelson, Slavery, Geography, and Empire, pp. 245–246. 16 Kriz, ‘Marking Mulatresses’, p. 206; emphasis added. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 207. 19 Eva Saks, ‘Representing Miscegenation Law’, in Werner Sollors (ed.), Interracialism: Black–White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 73. 20 It is only fair to acknowledge here that I do agree with Kriz that close analysis suggests that this figure is a woman of mixed African and European heritage. Particularly interesting in this regard is the compositional triad Brunias constructs under the rosy umbrella comprised of the apparently white man (for there is no reason to doubt his whiteness), the woman in white, and the dark-skinned woman who holds the shade just behind her, their bodies forming an overlapping union and, perhaps, an embedded clue hinting at the grouping as a possible family portrait. This tantalising speculation aside, however, I contend that the ‘correct’ reading of the figure’s race is not the objective of the painting as much as the questioning of it. 21 Rosenthal, ‘Visceral Culture’, p. 567. 22 Ibid., p. 579. 23 Ibid. 24 Saks, ‘Representing Miscegenation Law’, p. 74. 25 Ibid., p. 73. 26 See Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), especially chs 1 and 2, ‘Looking Mighty Sprucy’ and ‘Done up in the Tastiest Manner’. 27 Carmichael, Five Years in Trinidad and St. Vincent, pp. 144–146. 28 Ibid., p. 84. 29 Quoted in Aileen Ribeiro, The Dress Worn at Masquerades in England, 1730 to 1790, and its Relation to Fancy Dress in Portraiture (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984), p. 105. 30 For a comprehensive discussion of the obsession with whiteness and skin cultivation practices of Caribbean Creoles, see Deirdre Coleman, ‘Janet Schaw and the Complexions of Empire’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 36.2 (2003), pp. 169–193. 31 Schaw quoted in Coleman, ‘Janet Schaw and the Complexions of Empire’, p. 179. 32 Correspondence dated 4 March 1987, Brunias clippings file, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.



Can you find the white woman in this picture?

33 Long, History of Jamaica, p. 279. 34 C. Melmonth, Esq (Samuel Jackson Pratt), The New Cosmetic, or, the Triumph of Beauty (London, 1790), p. 30. 35 Kriz, ‘Marketing Mulatresses’, p. 203; emphasis added. 36 See the previous chapter for a thorough reading of this image. 37 This chapter and, indeed, this book as a whole demonstrate the importance of viewing an image relative to an artist’s larger body of work; comparing many works by the same artist yields fresh interpretations of even a single work. This is even more true in Brunias’s case as many of his works were probably intended to be viewed in pairs or sets. 38 Both paintings were part of the Roseberry collection and were later purchased by the Trittons. The existence of an almost identical work (fig. 57) suggests that this type of representation was not exceptional in the artist’s oeuvre and that, indeed, there was some sort of demand for it. This similar work, now in the collection of the Baroness Thyssen-Bornemizsa in Spain, is known there by the title Creole Woman and Servants, suggesting that the two darker-skinned women are in the employ of the lighter one but providing no definitive conclusion about the race of any of them. The title of this work provides an interesting contrast to that of the two conceptually similar paintings discussed in this section. Although all three paintings depict three women of similar complexions and in similar clothing, the three different titles make very different assumptions about the race and status of the figures Brunias represents. In Two Ladies, the pale women are equally white and equally free; in A Lady and a Mulatress, the two lighter-skinned women may both be free born, but only the ‘lady’ is assumed to be white; in A Creole Woman and Servants only the palest woman is presumed to be free, though ‘Creole’ does not necessarily mean white, while the two darker women, who also remain unmarked racially by the title, are assumed to be bondswomen in her service. 39 Both Marc Shell and Ann Stoler observe controversies related to nursing in the eighteenth century, particularly as wet nursing became a more common practice and the issue of what precisely could be absorbed through the exchange of milk became relevant. According to Stoler, French doctors pondered whether children fed the milk of non-human animals became, in some way, animals themselves. Shell observes that blood was not necessarily thicker than milk, arguing that ‘kinship by consanguinity and kinship by collactation amount[ed] to the same thing’ (Shell quoted in Stoler, p. 146). While Long certainly does not go so far as to suggest  that white Creole children who thrive on the milk of black nurses are no longer white, his comments do cast aspersions on the integrity of their white identities. See Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 146. For more on kinship by lactation, see Marc Shell, Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics, and Nationhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 40 Long, History of Jamaica, p. 276. 41 Ibid., p. 277. 42 Ibid., p. 276.

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43 As a long-term resident of the Caribbean himself, Long had a decided interest in defending the character of white West Indians and engaged in some impressive  rhetorical gymnastics to accomplish this while also asserting his particular ideas about the potentially protean nature of race. See my discussion of Long in Chapter 1. 44 Saks, ‘Representing Miscegenation Law’, p. 73. 45 Judith Butler’s groundbreaking scholarship on identity and performance provides a useful conceptual framework for understanding the implications of Brunias’s work. While Butler’s work has evolved considerably since the watershed publication of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, the main argument of that book, which understands the conventional alignment of biological sex with gender identity and sexual orientation to be a socio-cultural construction, remains a salient and influential contribution to academic discourse. The Butlerian notion of the physical body as a sort of tabula rasa on to which social and cultural identities are projected and then performed fits well with Brunias’s tableaux, which force the viewer to question the alignment of colour, racial identity, and status in the British colonial West Indies; see Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

Coda – Pushing Brunias’s buttons, or rebranding the plantocracy’s painter: the afterlife of Brunias’s imagery

In 1949 New York City’s Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, one of nineteen national museums that comprise the Smithsonian Institution, acquired a set of eighteen remarkable painted buttons (fig. 58).1 Measuring just under an inch and half in diameter – large for buttons but terrifically tiny for p ­ aintings2 – each of these extraordinary fasteners features a Caribbean scene painted in gouache on thin canvas affixed to an ivory backing and protected by a glass dome rimmed with gold-hued metal. The imagery – which includes dark-skinned dancing couples in turbans and kerchiefs, pugnacious negroes fighting with ‘cudgelling’ sticks, fabulously outfitted mulatresses engaged in conversation, and beautiful brown blanchisseuses,3 who are, by contrast, fabulously undressed – unequivocally belongs to Brunias. The buttons, reputedly, belonged to Toussaint L’Ouverture. In ‘A Mystery in Miniature’, an aptly titled article published in Smithsonian Magazine in 2000, Ann Geracimos uses the ‘enigmatic’ buttons as a point of entry for discussing L’Ouverture’s career as ‘Haiti’s greatest liberator’ and opines that ‘the button scenes [may have] represented Haitian life as Toussaint hoped it would become, free of slavery and perhaps even of discrimination by shadings of skin color – from white to mulatto to black – which were responsible for so much of the discord in the colonial world of the West Indies’.4 Geracimos thus divorces the images from the plantocratic context of their creation, ironically recasting them as scenes of liberation, and this is certainly how the buttons must have been understood when, for example, six of them were on loan for almost a decade to the Musée des Pères de la Patrie (later the Musée du Panthéon National) in Port-au-Prince and exhibited in a case with objects that belonged to L’Ouverture.5 Far from being exceptional, Geracimos’s interpretation represents an increasingly popular way in which contemporary audiences engage with Brunias’s complicated images, considering them less in terms of how they might have been understood within the context of their creation and more with regard to the possibilities for different, arguably more radical, readings despite this context of slavery and colonialism. My own project is, perhaps, implicated in this ­­enterprise to a

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58a-i

Attributed to Agostino Brunias, late eighteenth century, gouache paint on tin verre fixé, ivory (backing), glass, gilt metal, h. x diam.: 1 x 3.7 cm (3/8 x 1 7/16 in.)

certain extent, though I hope I have been clear in my assessment of Brunias’s paintings as tools that simultaneously served the plantocracy and revealed the instability of the racialised foundations upon which it was built. A coda to the previous chapters’ explorations of Brunias’s paintings, this concluding chapter uses an investigation of the buttons as a point of departure for examining the enduring significance of the artist’s work, considering how its uncanny malleability has allowed it to serve diverse, arguably conflicting ends, in various contexts, virtually from the moment of its creation to the present. I want to think about how Brunias’s imagery – largely removed from any acknowledgement of its creator or the context of its creation – has



Coda – Pushing Brunias’s buttons, or rebranding the plantocracy’s painter

Continued

been ­­mobilised to serve different interests, some completely contrary to those of their original commission.6 Moreover, I especially want to consider the complex significance with which the artist’s work has been invested by contemporary viewers and art institutions seeking to diversify their collections or appeal to a more racially diverse viewership (and how their connection, however tenuous, to L’Ouverture has lent credibility to this enterprise). Might dealers and curators be considered as spin-doctors who have reinvented the meaning of Brunias’s works for the twenty-first century, and what is the significance of this reinvention? Can these pictures, originally made for plantocratic parlours, occupy a more progressive place when hanging in the halls

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of today’s museums, or is this merely a superficial gesture that dangerously distorts the perception of slavery and the realities of race in the eighteenthcentury Caribbean for the twenty-first-century popular imagination? In short, what do and can these images mean to and for our own time? The mystery of the Cooper-Hewitt buttons begins in 1939, the year that Pauline Riggs Noyes, whose estate gifted them to the museum, purchased them at an auction at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris featuring eighteenth-century decorative objects from the estate of Etienne Accary.7 Louis Bonnefoy, a dealer who apparently had a hand in arranging for the liquidation of the estate (but who also offered his services as her agent), wrote to Noyes to alert her to several items, including the buttons, that he thought might be of interest to her. According to the dealer, a letter found at Accary’s home established the buttons’ provenance, tracing them to the legendary Haitian rebel leader Toussaint L’Ouverture. The document supposedly found at M. Accary’s home is worth quoting in its entirety: Toussaint L’Ouverture, taken to France after the happenings at Santo Domingo, was imprisoned at the fort of Joux and afterwards transferred to the prison of Besancon, where he died in 1813. Before dying, he left his effects to the boy who had served him, with a great deal of attention, in his prison. A short time thereafter, this boy, who was from Sedan, returned to the region of his birth, taking with him, among other objects which Toussaint had left him, the latter’s holiday coat. As he could not use this coat, which was made of silk and embroidered with spangles, he stored it at the bottom of a trunk, where his heirs found it after his death, all musty and ragged. These heirs were poor people; some neighbors who had occasion to see the coat advised selling the buttons. Among these neighbors was the housekeeper of one of my colleagues, a professor at the College of Sedan, M. Lelongt. This woman spoke to M. Lelongt about the buttons, and he undertook to try to get some money out of them. As a matter of fact, he brought them to Charleville one day and let me see them. As the price he was asking seemed to me quite reasonable in view of their value and origin, I bought them immediately. This is how I came into possession of buttons from the holiday coat of Toussaint L’Ouverture.8

This quaint tale evokes the iconic image of L’Ouverture in the popular imagination – perpetually outfitted in elegant military dress uniform embellished with epaulettes at the shoulder and accented with plumed tricorn hat. No confirmed portrait of L’Ouverture taken from life exists; however, regardless of political orientation, artists’ depictions of the rebel leader invariably show him in this way, dressed to the nines in elaborate regalia. This is as true of the flurry of prints of L’Ouverture that appeared in the early nineteenth century – from reasonably flattering ones published by François Bonneville in Portraits des personnages célèbres de la Revolution (1802) to the ­­denigratingly



Coda – Pushing Brunias’s buttons, or rebranding the plantocracy’s painter

simian profile by Nicolas Eustache Maurin (1832; fig. 59) – as it is of twentiethcentury renderings such as the famed 1938 series by the African American artist Jacob Lawrence or the 1989 sculpture by the Senegalese artist Ousmane Sow. However, depending on the context, the effect of the costume can be interpreted differently, either as the sartorial splendour befitting a proud revolutionary hero or as a racist caricature of a ‘savage’ in the clothes of a soldier or, worse, a monkey dressed like a man. The legend of the buttons simultaneously maintains the image of L’Ouverture as proud revolutionary while suggesting the ridiculousness of his position; outfitted in silk and spangles, he remains insistently dapper despite his status as a prisoner in the Fort-de-Joux. Moreover, shifting the racialised balance of power in ways that belie the realities of race and power in the colonial Caribbean, the anecdote ironically transforms the man who had been born into slavery from a powerless prisoner into a generous master who rewards his impoverished faithful servant with the gift of a garment so grand that he has no use for it.9 The curious case of the Cooper-Hewitt buttons presents a multitude of mysteries heretofore left unprobed. Did Brunias paint the buttons himself? Did they, in fact, adorn L’Ouverture’s habit de gala or fancy dress coat? Moreover – especially if both of these claims prove to be apocryphal – how is it that Brunias’s work came to be associated with the iconic Haitian revolutionary, and, most significantly, how could it seem plausible that Sir William Young and Toussaint L’Ouverture both found the same imagery appealing, that the same paintings that hung in a British colonial governor’s plantation house might also adorn the jacket of a great liberator of slaves? In investigating the credibility of the buttons’ provenance, both their attribution to Brunias and their connection to L’Ouverture must be scrutinised. While the tableaux featured on the painted discs certainly evoke Brunias’s canvases, it does not require a connoisseur’s eye to discern a significant difference between the skill level of the button painter and that of the academically trained artist. Not even the miniature format, which certainly amplified the difficulty of the task, can account for the discrepancy in quality. Sir William Young had been the governor of Dominica, owned plantations in St Vincent, Antigua, and Tobago, and almost certainly had occasion to visit other locations in the British Caribbean, particularly Barbados, which emerged as the seat of colonial government for the British Windward Islands. However, no evidence suggests that either he or Brunias ever travelled to St Domingue (present-day Haiti), on the island of Hispaniola, which was quite distant from the British stronghold in the far reaches of the Lesser Antilles. This renders their creation by Brunias unlikely. Archival evidence reveals doubts about the buttons’ attribution to Brunias as early as 1946. A letter in the museum file concedes: ‘When the buttons first came we were told that they had been painted by Brunias for Toussant [sic]

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Nicolas Eustache Maurin, ‘Portrait of Toussaint Louverture’, lithograph, 51 x 33 cm, from Iconographie des contemporains depuis 1789 jusqu’à 1829 (Paris, 1833; engraver François Séraphin Delpech, 1778–1825), p. 65

l’Ouverture. Now that theory seems incorrect and we feel quite certain that the pictures on the buttons [are] … taken from Brunias’ prints, but probably not painted by him.’ Despite this knowledge, the attribution to Brunias persists, though sometimes with an emphasis on the ‘attributed to’. Geracimos’s article describes the buttons as ‘painted by Agostino Brunias or perhaps by someone of his school’, effectively increasing the cachet of the objects even while casting doubt on Brunias’s direct authorship by suggesting that he was an artist of enough status to actually have a ‘school’. Still, regardless of whether or not Brunias painted the buttons himself, the imagery they depict



Coda – Pushing Brunias’s buttons, or rebranding the plantocracy’s painter

is clearly his and their connection to him, therefore, a natural one. But what of their connection to St Domingue and to L’Ouverture? How did the artist’s images come to be associated with Haiti and its iconic rebel leader? The association of Brunias’s images with St Domingue pre-dates the legend of their association with its black liberator by nearly 150 years. Although the tale of Toussaint’s buttons did not surface until 1939, Brunias’s imagery was connected to St Domingue as early as 1791 when Moreau de Saint-Méry published six Brunias scenes reproduced by the engraver Nicolas Ponce in Recueil des vues des lieux principaux de la colonie française de Saint-Domingue, itself part of an even more massive undertaking, Loix et constitutions des colonies françaises de Amérique sous le vent (Paris, 1784–90). A suite of beautiful stipple engravings made by Brunias himself in 1779–80, apparently during a brief return to London, served as the source of the images reproduced by Ponce for Moreau de Saint-Méry’s project. These included Free Natives of Dominica (fig. 60), A Negroes Dance in the Island of Dominica (fig.  61), A Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in the Island of Dominica (fig. 34), The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl (fig. 62), The West India Washer-Women (fig. 63), and, probably, The West India Flower Girl (a print version of the painting West Indian Flower Girl and Two other Free Women of Color, fig. 46). The works feature elaborate dedications to elite Britons with West Indian interests as well as Brunias’s signature as painter and engraver, ‘A. Brunias, pinxt et sculpt’. In contrast to the titles given to Brunias’s paintings by auction houses and museum curators, these engravings provide a rare example of period descriptive text attached by Brunias to the works themselves, and, importantly, in pinpointing the locations – in four cases quite specifically, in the other two at least in a general sense – the text links the images to a specific British West Indian geography. Ponce’s engravings (fig. 64) faithfully reproduce Brunias’s compositions in all but two quite important respects. First, in place of the elaborate titles and dedications, the engravings are accompanied by short, descriptive labels such as ‘Costumes’ and ‘Danse de Négres’ [sic] that omit specific geographic information but clearly imply, given the context of their publication, that the images represent St Domingue. Secondly, while Brunias’s prints conform to a rather standard rectangular design, Ponce presents the compositions in a circular format. This essentially compresses the landscape and pushes the figures even more to the fore of the picture plane. The circular frame acts as a zoom lens, effectively magnifying the image and amplifying its voyeuristic quality and the sense that the viewer actively witnesses the scene. The circular composition thus reinforces the authority of the fabricated labels, presenting the images as eyewitness views of the French colony. Supplemented by two rather incongruous images of colonial civil engineering projects, the vignettes are spread in groups of four over two thick, woven pages. With each orb

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Print made by Agostino Brunias, Free Natives of Dominica, 1780, stipple engraving and etching on moderately thick, slightly textured, beige wove paper

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Print made by Agostino Brunias, A Negroes Dance in the Island of Dominica, 1779, stipple engraving and etching on moderately thick, slightly textured, beige wove paper

61



perfectly spaced, each caption perfectly centred, the meticulously ordered ­­composition – much like Brunias’s own idealised canvases – suggests a social harmony that belies the violent revolution raging at the time of the book’s publication. At first glance, the Ponce engravings seem to be the key to unlocking the mystery of the buttons. Their publication in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s epic volume establishes a period connection between the imagery and St Domingue, while their circular composition suggests a perfect formal precedent for the painted roundels, so perfect, in fact, that one source reproduces an illustration of the Ponce engravings but mislabels them as the buttons in the caption.10 Moreover, each of the Brunias scenes reproduced by Ponce appears, with very little alteration, on its own button.11 However, this only accounts for six of the eighteen buttons. What of the other twelve? Careful study of the tiny paintings reveals that the remaining buttons are composite scenes in which the artist simply recycles figures from two or more of the prints in new combinations, with all but two of the figures featured on the buttons appearing somewhere in the prints.12

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Print made by Agostino Brunias, The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl, 1779, stipple engraving and etching on moderately thick, moderately textured, beige wove paper

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Print made by Agostino Brunias, The West India Washer-Women, 1779, stipple engraving and etching on moderately thick, moderately textured, beige wove paper

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Nicolas Ponce after Agostino Brunias, illustrations from Recueil de vues des lieux principaux de la colonie françoise de Saint-Domingue…, 1791

These two figures, however, present a critical conundrum in the attempt to trace the buttons’ formal antecedent to Ponce’s engravings. The pair appears as a couple on one of the buttons (fig. 58f). Stocky and dark-skinned, both are topless and wear nearly identical aprons created from some sort of vegetal fibre on their lower half. The male figure, sporting a spiky crown of tall red feathers, gestures to the woman who holds a bow before her and has a quiver of arrows strapped to her back. These accessories, common since at least the sixteenth century in allegorical depictions of America, mark them as American indigenes. However, no such figures appear in the Ponce engravings after Brunias. Indeed, Brunias never engraved or painted figures like these at all, as their cliché accoutrements in no way resemble Brunias’s Red Caribs, whose intricate beadwork aprons and pegal baskets manufacture a sense of authenticity, or even his Black Caribs whose ornaments attempt to mimic it. Therefore, the indigenes depicted on the buttons suggest that the painter must have been familiar with Brunias’s general oeuvre and the presence of Caribs in it, but that he or she did not have direct access to Brunias’s work as a reference while painting the objects. Moreover, other factors indicate that the Ponce prints are not the original  source of the buttons. For example, while Ponce’s images reverse  Brunias’s  original engravings as would be expected, the orientation of the buttons corresponds to the original works. Additionally, some tiny details, such as a ribbon around the neck of the lovely central nude holding the washing paddle in The West India Washer-Women, are repro-



Coda – Pushing Brunias’s buttons, or rebranding the plantocracy’s painter

duced on the buttons but not in Ponce’s prints. However, the most telling indicator that the Ponce prints are not the direct formal precedent for the buttons is  the button painter’s use of colour. A number of hand-coloured engravings directly after Brunias or evocative of his compositions demonstrate that the colourists generally had no knowledge of Brunias’s usual and relatively limited colour palette. While the painter consistently favoured the same shades of blue, red, white, and ochre, producing a sense of uniformity, order, and calm for his oeuvre, these coloured engravings often feature a jarring cacophony of colour in every shade of the rainbow (see, for example, fig. 65). The buttons, however, faithfully reproduce Brunias’s general colour scheme, another indicator that the artist who created them was familiar with Brunias’s paintings. Perhaps the suite of Brunias’s prints that Ponce copied and whose figures populate the buttons are after paintings from the same collection to which the button artist had access, and the Carib figures on the buttons are based upon the recollection of other paintings that the artist had seen. While these discoveries shed light on the ‘mystery in miniature’, the full story of the buttons – where and when they were made and for whom – remains unknown. The letter from Jean Milaire purportedly found at Accary’s home nearly a century and a half after Toussaint L’Ouverture’s death is the sole document establishing the buttons’ provenance or their connection to the revolutionary leader, and given the convenient timing of its discovery and that it was initially brought to light by a dealer with an interest in creating a demand for the objects, its claims must be met with a certain degree of scepticism, if not dismissed as entirely dubious. Interestingly, around the same time as L’Ouverture supposedly adorned his coat with the buttons and France prepared to lose the ‘pearl of the Antilles’ for good, a number of French engravers, perhaps in a nostalgic effort to preserve an idealised vision of the past, busied themselves making prints directly after or evocative of Brunias’s work, and these, in addition to the Ponce engravings, have contributed to the confusion of British Dominica with French St Domingue. Indeed, to the present day, in museums and academic texts, Brunias’s imagery continues to be used to represent the former French colony. This confusion has even been extrapolated to include New Orleans, as Brunias-inspired images, particularly a group of engravings by Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur (after Labrousse) that were published in the 1796 Encyclopédie des voyages and used to represent St Domingue, are often used to represent the wave of refugees from Haiti to New Orleans during and after the revolution (see, for example, fig. 66).13 Moreover, in retrospect, I realised that I had seen Brunias’s imagery long before I ever embarked upon this project or even knew the artist’s name, when, as a college undergraduate, I visited the Louisiana State Museum where these images after

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65

Print made by Louis Charles Ruotte, The West India Flower Girl, undated, stipple engraving and etching with hand colouring on moderately thick, moderately textured, cream laid paper



Coda – Pushing Brunias’s buttons, or rebranding the plantocracy’s painter

J. Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, ‘Nègre et Négresse de Saint-Domingue’, from Encyclopédie des voyages, contenant l’abrégé historique des moeurs, usages, habitudes domestiques, religions, fêtes (Paris: Deroy, 1796)

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Brunias stood in as illustrations of the Domingan émigrés to New Orleans. Ironically, Brunias, the painter of the plantocracy, is responsible for images that frequently illustrate the ‘resistance to Anglo-American domination’ reinforced by Domingan refugees in New Orleans.14 Indeed, losing all their specificity, the painter’s protean images seem to have functioned, virtually since the time of their creation, as pan-Caribbean icons. This is especially true of his depictions of finely dressed brown and black men and women which seem to serve as representations of free people of colour anywhere. For example, the historic New Orleans Collection, rather inexplicably, sells a postcard of an engraving after Brunias in its gift shop. Perhaps more significant, therefore, than the probably apocryphal tale of the buttons are the cultural stakes that the legend implies, and what the buttons and other appropriations of Brunias’s work suggest about the flexibility and endurance of his imagery; how the meaning of the images can be transformed when they are imagined affixed to the front of Toussaint’s coat rather than hanging in the hall of Young’s plantation house. While the legend of L’Ouverture’s buttons almost certainly represents  the  fanciful invention of a savvy dealer, it was not the first or last attempt to  repurpose Brunias’s imagery in a way that distanced it, indeed entirely  divorced it, from the deeply pro-slavery, colonialist context of its original  creation. In her queer, feminist reading of sexuality and labour in one  of Brunias’s  provocative paintings of washerwomen in a stream, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley usefully describes Brunias’s paintings as ‘insufficiently colonial’.15 This observation both acknowledges their origin in and service to a pro-slavery, colonialist agenda, but also captures the potential of the images to be repurposed to serve interests contrary to those that they were originally intended to reflect. Although this quality of Brunias’s images exists independently of their association with L’Ouverture, their oft-cited connection to Toussaint buttresses the claims of those who reimagine the painter’s imagery outside of the plantocratic paradigm. For example, Tinsley cites the fact that L’Ouverture wore buttons painted with Brunias’s images as evidence of their ‘insufficiently colonial’ nature. I would argue that the plausibility of such a story itself proves the inherent instability of their meaning and their potential to challenge the very interests they were intended to serve. In recent years, as identity politics has continued to inform the practices of museum institutions, albeit often in token ways, Brunias’s work has acquired a certain cachet not only because of its ability to serve as an index of race and power in the colonial West Indies, but because of its ability to add a bit of colour to the sea of lily-white faces that tend to dominate American and European museum collections. As a result, several major museums have actively pursued Brunias’s paintings for their collections, while those that



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already possessed his pictures have given the artist’s work a more prominent place.16 For example, in 2011 the Brooklyn Museum purchased a stunning Brunias picture, Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape (fig. 67). The painting presents an intriguing colonial Caribbean revision of the English conversation piece in which a party of women, children, and servants pauses along a path in the depths of a wooded landscape. Poised at the precise centre of the image, an arresting mixed-race woman, dressed entirely in an elegant white ensemble save for the tiniest hint of blue petticoat peeking out from beneath her full skirt, commands the viewer’s attention with her coquettish gaze, her countenance reminiscent of the brown Vixen in West Indian Flower Girl and Two other Free Women of Color (fig.  46).17 The acquisition was noticed in The New York Times, and the painting was immediately installed in the museum’s European galleries before being featured in a travelling exhibition organised by the museum that toured the USA between 2013 and 2015.18 The purchase corresponded well with the museum’s emphasis on community engagement and its reputation as an art institution that actively ‘engages contemporary public issues and new audiences’.19 Explaining the rationale behind adding the painting to the museum’s collection, Rich Aste, then curator of European art at the museum,

Agostino Brunias, Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape, c. 1770–96, oil on canvas, 20 x 26 1/8 in. (50.8 x 66.4 cm)

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suggested that the work reflected the institution’s commitment to engaging with the significant West Indian population in the surrounding neighbourhoods: ‘We have a large West Indian community … When I saw it [the painting], it just screamed Brooklyn. We were looking for something from the 18th century, and we didn’t have anything like this.’20 Distancing the painting, at least somewhat, from the colonialist interests it served, Aste asserted that the agenda for Brunias’s pictures ‘was to celebrate the mixed races and all the differences that were going on in the Caribbean’,21 and highlighting Brunias’s painting offered the museum the opportunity to celebrate the ethnic diversity of its own community. Moreover, in addition to allowing the museum to feature black and brown faces on what have conventionally been pristinely white walls, Brunias’s painting also provided the opportunity to present a rather remarkable depiction of people of colour in eighteenth-century art as something other than marginal attendants serving their white masters and mistresses. An initial major ­­selling point for the Brooklyn acquisition was that the painting ‘documents ­­ a particular reality that the Museum’s collections currently cannot: women of colour as “ladies of the manor” standing at the top of the socio-racial British colonial pyramid’.22 In other words, the museum understood Brunias’s picture as offering a unique representation of Afro-Caribbean agency and elite social status, an image of a woman of African descent in a position of power. Of course, as explored in Chapter 3, the substance of the power wielded by the elegantly attired, mixed-race woman at the centre of the painting is debatable, as is her existence as more than a fantasy created by the painter for a particular sort of client. However, even granting that women in such positions did exist as exceptional entities in Brunias’s colonial world, understanding the implications of how Brunias depicts them arguably requires significantly more nuance than a museum wall label can typically provide, and one must consider how privileging their depiction misrepresents the general dynamics of power and privilege with regard to race and gender in the colonial West Indies. In featuring women of African descent as plantation mistresses, the museum appears to actively respond to issues of race and diversity informed by contemporary era identity politics, while conveniently circumventing the general realities of race and power in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean. Indeed, rather than unpacking the very complicated ways in which Brunias’s pictures upheld plantocratic ideologies, the original online description of Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape on the Brooklyn Museum website emphasised its potential for anti-colonialist repurposing, observing that ‘although Brunias was originally commissioned to promote upper-class plantation life, his works soon assumed a more subversive, political role throughout the Caribbean as



Coda – Pushing Brunias’s buttons, or rebranding the plantocracy’s painter

endorsements of a free, anti-slavery society’.23 Moreover, Brunias’s alleged connection to Toussaint L’Ouverture lent credibility to such an interpretation.24 Significantly, however, his imagery’s purported association with L’Ouverture did not manufacture a new significance for it; it merely provided a sort of endorsement that validates an interpretation of the work that is available to contemporary viewers even without the legend, and the reframing of the works in the public discourse by museums only institutionalises a reading of Brunias’s images that their ‘insufficiently colonial’ nature has inspired for decades. As a child, the art historian and curator Sarah Clunis remembers being mesmerised by a series of small, nineteenth-century watercolour reproductions of Brunias paintings that hung in her maternal grandparents’ home in Jamaica (fig. 68 a–g).25 Clunis, whose mother hails from an old Jamaican Jewish family of Sephardic extraction and whose father is a Jamaican of African and East Indian descent, identified with Brunias’s mixed-race ­­beauties, his paintings seeming to celebrate a sort of beauty in which she could see herself. Thinking back to the relatively small paintings, which seemed to her like illustrations from a storybook, Clunis fondly recalls that ‘The women were dressed in such a way and interacting in such a way that it felt almost like a fairy tale; they felt like princesses to me.’26 The paintings also apparently had personal significance for her grandparents, who chose them to be among the few works from their impressive art collection that they kept when they moved from a large house in Jamaica to a considerably smaller apartment in Miami. Now a scholar of the history of these kinds of images, Clunis recognises their participation in the objectification of enslaved and free women of  African descent and is critical of discussions of the works that divorce them from their original context or minimise their role in service to slavery and colonialism.27 However, for her and, I must admit, for me, there is still something personally compelling about them, a unique opportunity to see our history and our own beauty reflected back to us. And although, sadly, it did not occur to me to ask this question until the very end of this project – as I wrote this coda, in fact – I now wonder: what did the brown and black women working in Sir William Young’s plantation home see in Brunias’s canvases? Did they view them as beautiful images at the foundation of an ugly system, or might they have seen themselves (literally!) and recognised an appreciation of their own beauty? Throughout this book, I have urged a re-evaluation of Agostino Brunias’s work, arguing that, more than simply uncomplicated examples of plantocratic propaganda, Brunias’s paintings function as unique indices of a critically inchoate moment in the forging of modern understandings of race. At times, they offer the possibility of interpretations that seem contrary to the purposes for which they were created. While some of these readings would probably not

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68a–d Unknown artist (after Agostino Brunias), untitled watercolours from the collection of Aaron and Marjorie Matalon, n.d.

have been explicitly available to viewers at the time, who, for example, were almost certainly not thinking about race as a social construction in the way that twenty-first-century viewers might, the instability of Brunias’s imagery, while not necessarily – or even probably – intentional, is a quality inherent to the works themselves, and a product of the critical juncture in the history of racialised thinking at which they were created, as well as of the unique position and vision of the artist who created them. While I find recent attempts



Coda – Pushing Brunias’s buttons, or rebranding the plantocracy’s painter

Continued

to rebrand Brunias an ‘Unlikely 18th C Racial Revolutionary’ seriously problematic, his more conventional designation as the ‘plantocracy’s painter’ also feels woefully insufficient, failing to recognise the complexity of his pictures despite their indisputable foundation in colonialist ideology.28 Undercutting

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their ostensible raison d’être, Agostino Brunias’s paintings potentially challenge the notion of a carefully ordered grid of human types in favour of a glorious melange of multi-hued humanity. The artist’s pictures reflect a unique vision of the world in which he lived, demonstrating the broad spectrum of human diversity but also suggesting openings for questioning a hierarchy of value along the continuum of human difference. Offering a distinctive vision of the British West Indies that was at once of and ahead of his time, Brunias’s captivating canvases find beauty and humanity in bodies white, black, and all shades of in-between. Notes 1 The buttons had arrived at the then Cooper Union Museum by 1942 as a loan, and were gifted to the museum in 1949 by the estate of Pauline Riggs Noyes. 2 Ann Geracimos, ‘A Mystery in Miniature’, Smithsonian (January 2000), p. 20. 3 Blanchisseuse, a French word for washerwoman, appears as a label for a reproduction of Brunias’s print The West India Washer-Women by the French engraver Nicolas Ponce. However, the term – like mulatress[e] – might well have been used by the British as well, especially as it provides a convenient and clever pun, since Blanchisseuse is also a village in Trinidad and Tobago. 4 Geracimos, ‘A Mystery in Miniature’, p. 20. 5 Documents in the museum file at the Cooper-Hewitt indicate that the buttons were on loan from 1977 until they were recalled in 1986 over concerns about the unstable political situation in Haiti. A 1983 letter in the file from Gaston Hermatin, Director General of the Musée du Panthéon National, describes the buttons’ placement in an area dedicated to the ‘Act of Independence’ where they were housed ‘in a plexiglass case with other objects belonging to General Louverture’. 6 Throughout this chapter I will refer to ‘Brunias’s imagery’ to describe not only the types of images depicted in his own paintings and prints, but also a diverse array of works by other artists that were inspired by his oeuvre, whether directly after Brunias’s original compositions or simply including figures modelled on Brunias’s but not necessarily corresponding to any one particular work. 7 Noyes was the millionaire wife of the adventurer Robert Noyes (see Geracimos, ‘Mystery in Miniature’, p. 21). 8 This translation of the document is included in the acquisition file at the Cooper-Hewitt. 9 According to Carl Dreppard’s introduction to The Complete Button Book, painted picture buttons were popular accoutrements for fashionable men during the eighteenth century, and these fasteners made of precious materials were a way of carrying currency on one’s person. Moreover, button collecting was all the rage during the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Lillian Smith Albert published The Button Collector’s Journal and its sequel, A Button Collector’s Second Journal, which, combined with a daily chronicle of Albert’s button adventures, offered advice to novice button collectors and those wanting to start their own button clubs. This



Coda – Pushing Brunias’s buttons, or rebranding the plantocracy’s painter

was also when Mrs Noyes purchased the buttons in question and when they came to the Cooper-Hewitt. The Cooper Union Museum presented the exhibition Four Thousand and One Buttons in 1940. See Lillian Smith Albert and Kathryn Kent, The Complete Button Book (New York: Doubleday, 1949); A Button Collector’s Journal (1941) and A Button Collector’s Second Journal (The Cook Printers, 1941); Carl C. Dauterman, Buttons in the Collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum (museum pamphlet published in 1982 with an essay reprinted from 1940), http://library. si.edu/digital-library/book/buttonsincollect00coop (accessed 16 May 2017). 10 See Honychurch, ‘Agostino Brunias’, n.p., Figure 21. 11 Indeed, the button painter duplicates, virtually without alteration, the four threefigure compositions and presents cropped details of the more complex dancing and fighting episodes. 12 Each of the two figures is used on two buttons with only the pose slightly altered. 13 Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, Encyclopédie des voyages. Contenant l’abrégé historique des moeurs, usages, habitudes domestiques, religions, fêtes, supplices, funérailles, sciences, arts, et commerce de tous les peuples. Et la collection complete de leurs habillements civils, militaires (Paris: Deroy, 1796). 14 Caribbean Media Library, ‘New Orleans: A Brief Musical Excursion, 2. The Caribbean Arrives: The Domingan Migration of 1809–1810’, p. 1, http://www. lameca.org/dossiers/new_orleans_music/eng/p2.htm (accessed 16 May 2017). See also Sara E. Johnson, The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), p. 107. Johnson’s book also uses a Brunias engraving as its cover image. 15 Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 21. Tinsley also uses a Brunias painting as her cover image. Tinsley’s provocative analysis of the painting offers a model of reading Brunias’s works through a queer lens that also privileges the perspective of women of colour; see Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar, pp. 16–20. 16 With this admittedly rather cynical observation, I do not mean to suggest that this is the only or even the most important reason that Brunias’s work has garnered more interest in recent years; a whole constellation of factors – including the increased attention being paid to issues of race, slavery, and colonialism in the history of art and visual culture that I discuss in the introduction – have informed the artist’s rising popularity. 17 See my discussion of the brown Vixen trope in Brunias’s work and of West India Flower Girl specifically in Chapter 3. Additionally, I have written extensively about this painting in Agostino Brunias, Capturing the Caribbean (c.1770–1800) (London and Milan: Robilant+Voena Gallery, 2012), and ‘Reimagining Race, Class, and Identity in the New World’, in Richard Aste (ed.), Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492–1898 (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2013), pp. 161–208. 18 The Brooklyn Museum presented Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492–1898 from 20 September 2013 to 12 January 2014. The

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e­­ xhibition travelled to the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. 19 Quotation attributed to Tom Finkelpearl, commissioner of public affairs of New York City, regarding Brooklyn’s decision to hire Anne Pasternak, former president and artistic director of Creative Time as its new director. Finkelpearl suggested that Pasternak would continue the engagement with contemporary issues and the addressing of diversity that the museum had begun to prioritise during Arnold Lehman’s eighteen-year tenure as director. See Roberta Smith, ‘Brooklyn Museum Picks Anne Pasternak as Director’, New York Times, 19 May 2015. 20 Aste quoted in Carol Vogel, ‘Dominica in Brooklyn’, New York Times, 13 January 2011. 21 Aste quoted in Hrag Vartanian, ‘Brooklyn Museum’s New Acquisition Shines Light on Unlikely 18th C Racial Revolutionary’, Hyperallergic: Sensitive to Art & its Discontents, 19 January 2011, http://hyperallergic.com/17075/brooklyn-museumsacquisition-race-18th-c/ (accessed 16 May 2017). 22 This statement appeared in an early draft of the acquisition proposal made to the board. To his credit, the curator, Rich Aste, revised the claim after consultation with me, simply calling her a member of the ‘mixed-race elite’. Nonetheless, the notion that the painting could represent women of colour as at the pinnacle of the colonial social hierarchy and the possibility of reading the picture in this way prompted initial interest in the work. Aste’s initial and final draft proposals to the board sent via personal email communication with the author, 15 November and 17 November 2010. 23 To the museum’s and Rich Aste’s credit, this language was later removed in an effort to provide a more balanced characterisation of the picture. 24 In his initial petition to the board urging the purchase, Aste said of Brunias’s paintings: ‘Indeed, his utopian views of upper-class Dominican mulatresses functioned as a call-to-arms throughout the Caribbean in the wake of the French Revolution. Among the painter’s devotees was Haiti’s great liberator FrançoisDominique Toussaint, who wore on his waistcoat eighteen buttons decorated with reproductions of Brunias’s paintings of Dominica.’ Again, this observation is in no way meant as a criticism of Aste or of the Brooklyn Museum, whose commitment to diversifying its collections and representing the community the museum serves I wholeheartedly support. I merely aim to point to how the connection between Brunias’s imagery and Toussaint L’Ouverture upped the cachet of the painting. Aste’s initial and final draft proposal to the board sent via personal email communication with the author, 15 November and 17 November 2010. 25 Clunis, a specialist in the art of Africa and its diaspora, earned her PhD at the University of Iowa and is an assistant professor of art history at Xavier University. She inherited seven of the paintings from her maternal grandparents, Aaron and Marjorie Matalon. Three additional paintings from the set went to her cousins. Unfortunately, no information about the paintings’ provenance before her grandparents purchased them, probably some time in the mid-twentieth century, is available. Clunis’s reproductions are very meticulously rendered watercolour copies of oil paintings by Brunias that are currently in the collection of the Yale



Coda – Pushing Brunias’s buttons, or rebranding the plantocracy’s painter

Center for British Art. These paintings, a gift of Paul Mellon, had previously belonged to Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929), perhaps inherited from his family. The degree of detail evident in the Clunis reproductions and the fact that all the paintings came from the same collection suggests that the artist had direct access to the originals at some point. 26 Personal interview with the author, 12 June 2015. 27 Ibid. 28 This moniker appeared as part of the title of an article published in the online arts journal Hyperallergic: Sensitive to Art & its Discontents, 19 January 2011, http:// hyperallergic.com/17075/brooklyn-museums-acquisition-race-18th-c/ (accessed 16 May 2017).

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Index

Italicised page references refer to illustrations. Works are by Agostino Brunias unless otherwise attributed. Asterisks (*) after artworks denote author’s title constructions. abolitionism 97, 98, 114–115 Accademia di San Luca 37n.55 Accary, Etienne 218, 227 Account of the Black Charaibs, An (Young, 1st Baronet) Black Carib women, treatment of 82n.5 Carib population statistics 51, 55–56, 86n.42 Carib race distinctions 45, 47–51, 52–53, 55, 70, 73 publication of 47, 84–85n.22 race perceptions 50, 73 Actaeon and Diana (myth) 143, 154–162, 157, 158 Adam, James 19 Adam, Robert 3, 17–21, 22 Adam and Eve 66, 149 Adams, Edgar 84n.21 Africa, allegorical representations of 163, 164 African Hospitality (Morland) 129n.10 Africans bestiality comparisons 180n.49 as Brunias’s subject speciality 4, 23 clothing styles representing 111–112 cultural activities of 95–96 plantation landscape inclusion and naturalisation of 101–104, 106, 107, 127 racial status of 157–159 repurposed imagery of 221, 223, 226, 227, 229, 230

river scenes with 199–201, 200 scholarly studies on Brunias’s portrayals of 26 St Vincent population statistics 44–45 stereotypical depictions of 51, 117–119, 134–135n.68, 219 terminology usage and definition 29 see also Afro-Creoles; black attendant figures; Black Caribs; slavery and enslaved people Afro-Creoles bestiality comparisons 180n.49 as Brunias’s subject speciality 4, 23 cultural activities 96 inclusion and depiction of 11 plantation landscape inclusion and naturalisation of 101–104, 106, 107, 127 repurposed imagery of 221, 223, 226, 227, 229, 230 stereotypical depictions of 51, 117–119, 134–135n.68, 219 terminology usage and definition 29 see also black attendant figures; Black Caribs; slavery and enslaved people agency of enslaved people 11, 94, 99, 119, 124–127 of mulatresses 166, 174, 232 ‘Agostino Brunias, a Precursor of Gauguin’ (Honychurch) 26

‘Agostino Brunias, Romano, Robert Adam’s “Bred Painter”’ (Huth) 25–26 Albert, Lillian Smith 236–237n.9 Alcibar, Jose de: De Español y Negra, Mulato, attributed to 186, 187 ‘Alexander Brunias, peintre ethnographe de la fin du XVIIIe siècle, courte notice sur son oeuvre’ (Hamy) 25 America, allegorical representations of 154–155, 163–165, 164 American Plantation (retitled View on the River Roseau, Dominica) 25, 107, 108 Anecdotes of Painters (Edwards, E.) 14, 16, 25 L’Anthropologie (journal) 25 anti-colonialism 64, 215, 227, 228, 230, 232–233 see also resistance and revolution Antiques (journal) 26 Apollo Belvedere 62 Apter, Emily 152 Arabian Nights (Galland, trans.) 178–179n.39 Arcadia 99–105, 112, 127, 143–144, 149 architecture as colonial progress indicator 171, 173 drawings and designs for 21–22, 22 of enslaved communities 110, 120, 122–123 Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (exhibition) 4 assimilation, cultural 55, 70–71, 112, 123–124 Aste, Rich 231–232, 238n.22, 238n.24 Audinet, Philip 12 authority gesture symbolising 76, 78 mulatresses and gendered dynamics of 165–174 mulatto men and absence of 179–180n.48 posture indicating 39, 75–76 voyeurism 157, 159, 162 weaponry as symbols of 76, 89n.87, 90–91n.92 Axtell, James 90n.89

Index bamboula (Afro-Creole dance) 111, 131n.32 Barbadoes Mulatto Girl, The 221, 224 Barringer, Tim 100, 103, 104, 106, 112–113 Bartolozzi, Francesco: ‘From different Parents, different Climes we came...’ 76–77, 77 bathing scenes artistic influences on 179n.45 classical sources for 143, 154–162, 157, 158 as recurrent subject 176–177n.13 see also Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing Bathsheba (Rembrandt) 179n.45 ‘Beautiful Slave Girl, The’ (Marino) 145 Beckford of Somerly, William 100, 129–130n.13–15 Beckles, Hilary McD. 94 Behind Closed Doors (exhibition) 237–238n.18 Belisario, Isaac Mendes 4, 11, 98–99, 112, 114–115 see also Sketches of Character (Belisario) ‘Bella schiava’ (Marino) 145 bestiality 180n.49 Bilby, Kenneth 126 Birth of Venus (Botticelli) 144, 147, 148, 162 black attendant figures Caribbean portraits with 2, 2, 139, 206, 206–208, 207 European portraits with 153, 154 of mythological goddesses 157, 158, 161 symbolism of 161–162, 170, 192, 204, 208–209 Black Caribs authenticity and character challenges 67–70, 68, 69, 80, 89n.74 chiefs/national heroes of 39–44, 40, 41, 67 colonial racial/character perceptions of 45–55, 62–66, 70, 73, 80–81 cultural practices and comparisons 50–51 deportation 48 enslavement of 45, 49, 85–86n.32

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Index Black Caribs (cont.) hybridity and gender ambiguity 73–78, 74 origins and history of 44–46, 49 physical descriptions of 51, 52 population statistics 44–45, 51, 55–56 racial descriptions of 46, 52, 70–71 resistance to colonialism by 39, 44, 47, 49–50 scholarly studies on 26 wartime practices 51 women, treatment of 40, 82n.5 Black Jokes, Being a Series of Laughable Caricatures on the March of Manners Amongst Blacks (Tregear) 117 ‘Black Legend’ (Casas) 64 Blake, William: Europe Supported by Africa and America 163, 164 blanchisseuses, see washerwomen blush (rosy cheeks) 191, 192, 200 Bonnefoy, Louis 218 Bonneville, François 218 Bonomi, Joseph 20 bon sauvage 64, 66 Botticelli, Sandro: Birth of Venus 144, 147, 148, 162 Boydell, John 100 Brant, Joseph 83n.11, 90n.89 Brooklyn Museum 231–233 Brunias, Agostino, biographical information art education 18, 26 birthplace 18 British West Indies travels 3, 17, 24, 36n.45 death 24 England return 23–24 family and descendants of 23 name and nationality 14, 16, 26 patrons of 3, 17, 18–23 portraits of 14–16, 15 scholarly studies on 16–17, 25–27 Brunias, Agostino, works architecture drawings and designs 21–22, 22 artistic influences 16, 17, 61–62

artistic significance and legacy 24–25, 230–232, 233–236 art style descriptions 5, 25, 27, 57, 182–188, 193–194, 209 art themes and subject specialities 4–7, 10–11, 23, 24, 37n.56 commission purpose 182–183, 185 engraving production 12–13, 24, 37–38n.65 exhibitions of 22, 24, 37n.55, 236–237n.9, 237–238n.18 museum acquisitions 230–231 self-portraits in 34–35n.22, 126, 127, 137, 153 stock characters 193, 199, 203 text descriptions 143, 177n.14, 186, 188, 221 title designations 31–32 see also buttons, painted; engravings by Brunias; reproductions; specific titles Brunias, Augustin 23 Brunias, Edward 23 Brunias, Elizabeth 36n.48 Bry, Theodor de 56, 61, 87n.56 Buckridge, Steeve O. 75, 89–90n.87–88, 90n.91, 128n.8 Burnard, Trevor 140, 142, 166, 178n.29 Bush, Barbara 144–145 Butler, Judith 210, 214n.45 buttons, painted 236–237n.9 buttons (associated with Toussaint L’Ouverture) attribution research 219–221, 223, 226, 226–227 descriptions and subject matter 215, 216, 217 exhibitions of 215, 236–237n.9 original themes 215–216 provenance 13, 92, 215, 218, 227 thematic appropriation 215, 221, 230 Cabrera, Miguel 211n.12 cannibalism 63–64 Caravanne du sultan á la Mecque (Vien) 14–16, 15 Caribbeans on a Path (Les Caraïbes noirs de Saint-Vincent) 67–69, 68, 78

Caribs/Charaibs colonial race perceptions and division distinctions 45–55, 62–66, 70, 73, 80–81 culture practices and comparisons 50–51 decimation ideology 56 modern culture assimilation of 55 origins and history 44 painted buttons featuring 226, 227 physical descriptions and hybridity 50–51, 52 population statistics 44–45, 51, 55–56, 86n.42 women, treatment of 40 see also Black Caribs; Red (Yellow) Caribs Carib Wars 39–44, 42, 47, 49–50, 55 caricatures 117–119, 134–135n.68, 219 Carmichael, Mrs A. C. 9, 11, 112, 123, 166, 197–198 Carting and Putting Sugar-Hogsheads on Board (Clark) 82–83n.9 Casas, Bartolomé de las 64 casta painting 186–187, 188 Catlin, George 56 Cesari, Giuseppe (Cavalier d’Arpino): Diana and Actaeon 156, 157 chamacou (Carib clay bowls) 69, 87n.60 character, racial identity based on 45–55, 62–66, 70, 73, 80–81 Chatoyer (Black Carib leader) 39–44, 41, 42, 49, 82n.8 ‘Chatoyer’s Artist: Agostino Brunias and the Depiction of St. Vincent’ (Honychurch) 26 Chatoyer the Chief of the Black Caribs in St. Vincent with his Five Wives (Grignon after Brunias) 39–40, 41 chica (Afro-Creole dance) 111, 131n.32 Ciboney 44 Cinzio, Giambattista Giraldi 178n.39 Clapera, Francisco 211n.12 Clark, William: Carting and Putting SugarHogsheads on Board, from Ten Views in Antigua 82–83n.9

Index classicism architectural design influences 18, 21–22, 35n.41 mythological influences 143, 154–162 of Native Indians 61–62 nudity conventions 61–62, 147 Clay, Edward Williams: Life in Philadelphia series 117 Clérisseau, Charles-Louis 18, 19 climate-induced racial features 71–72 clothing and dress assimilation of colonial culture by 94–95 colonial cultural assimilation 111–112, 124 colonial progress 173, 174 hybridity and gender ambiguity 76–80 hybridity as subversion 70–72, 75, 78 Native American imagery and symbolism 76, 90–91n.92 racial authenticity 70, 89n.74 racial identification and hierarchy 181n.61, 190 shoelessness 75, 89n.87, 95, 125, 128n.8 social status 74–75, 89n.87, 94, 184, 194–199, 205 whiteness accentuated with 156, 159, 191 Clunis, Sarah 233 Coleman, Deirdre 8, 199 colonial gaze 5–6, 11, 117–119, 122 colonialism hybridity perceived as threat to 70–72, 75, 78, 80, 142, 191, 192, 193, 195, 201–202 individual agency as threat to 11, 94, 119, 126–127, 166, 174 opposition to 64, 232–233 (see also resistance and revolution) plantocratic propaganda as art theme 3–4, 7, 10–11, 24, 92–93 progress, visual metaphors of 12, 27, 42, 170–171, 171, 173, 174 tropics, view of 143–144 Colonial Scene series series descriptions 167 Two Mulatresses and a Child with a Black Woman Selling Fruit* 168–171, 169

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Index Columbus, Christopher 44, 62–64, 66 commerce as colonial progress indicator 171, 173, 174 landscape backdrops for 144 mulatresses as products 131n.29, 137–140, 165, 168–170, 171, 174 Native American exchange symbolism 76, 90–91n.92 plantation landscapes and 102, 104–105 provision grounds and 94, 105, 198 trade scenes 105, 105, 131n.29, 169, 221, 224, 227, 228 see also market scenes Complete Button Book, The (Albert and Kent) 236–237n.9 concubinage 153–154 Connell, Neville 16, 26 Connoisseur, The (journal) 25 Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum 215, 218, 236–237n.9 Cornell University 200–201 Country Wedding, The (Krimmel) 124 ‘Couple Caraïbe des Antilles’ (Le Clerc) 64–66, 65 Craton, Michael 47, 84n.18 ‘Creole Negroes’ (Belisario) 113, 188, 189 Creole Woman and Servants 207, 213n.38 ‘Cries’ genre 113, 143, 165, 171, 173 crisis of representation 82, 160, 190–191, 200–201 Croft-Murray, Edward 14, 16, 25, 36n.45 Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in the Island of Dominica, A 126–127, 127, 221 Cummins, Alissandra 201 Dall’Acqua, Cristoforo: Famiglia Indiana Caraiba, after Stedman, attributed to 57–58, 60 dancing scenes Afro-Creole culture depictions 11, 92–93, 97, 109–112, 110, 120, 120–127, 124 Afro-Jamaican festival performers 118–119, 119

colonial assimilation imagery 112, 121, 123–124 Dauxion-Lavaysse, Jean-Jacques 55 Decorative Painting in England (CroftMurray) 14, 25 De Español y Negra, Mulato (Alcibar, attrib.) 186, 187 Delpech, François Séraphin: ‘Portrait of Toussaint Louverture’ 220 Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, A (Beckford) 100, 129n.14 ‘Design for the Painted Breakfast Room in the Family Pavilion’, Kedleston Hall (Brunias, attrib.) 21–22, 22 Dewez, Laurent-Benoît 18–21 Diana (goddess) 143, 154–162, 157, 158, 165 Diana and Actaeon (Cesari/Cavalier d’Arpino) 156 Diana Surprised by Actaeon (Naldini) 162 Diana Surprised by Actaeon (Titian) 157– 158, 158, 161 Dominica appropriation of Brunias’s images of 227 cudgelling matches 126–127, 127, 221 dancing 92, 109–112, 110, 120, 195–196, 221, 223 linen market scenes 182, 183, 188, 190–193, 199, 201 market scenes 193, 196 mulatresses 94, 95, 138, 139, 193, 195–196, 196, 221, 222 river scenes 107, 108, 193, 199–201, 200 ‘drawn from life’ (inscription) 143 Dreppard, Carl 236n.9 Drudge 145, 159 Duperly, Adolphe 113 du Vallé (Black Carib warrior) 41–42 Edwards, Bryan 39–40, 44, 56, 82n.5–6, 145, 185 Edwards, Edward 14, 16, 25 Emery, Lynne Fauley 131n.32 Encyclopédie des voyages 227, 229, 230 engravings after Brunias in Encyclopédie des voyages 227, 229, 230 engravers, list 12

hand-coloured 227, 228 in History, civil and commercial 39–40, 41, 44, 81n.3, 82n.6 in Recueil de vues 221, 223, 226, 226–227 engravings by Brunias inscriptions on 143, 177n.14 production of 12–13, 24, 37–38n.65 slave leisure scenes 126–127, 127, 131n.32, 221, 223 as sources for Recueil de vues illustrations 221, 222, 223, 223, 224, 225, 226–227 Enlightenment 6, 8, 26, 27, 183 entrepreneurialism of enslaved people 4, 11, 93, 94 ethnographic art as commission purpose 183 Native American portraits and standards of 83n.11 racial classifications/typology 6–7, 114, 182–188, 193–194, 209 representing indigenous authenticity 46, 54–59, 61–62, 64–66, 69–70, 80, 89n.74, 226 textual explanations as feature of 188 ‘Eunuque Blanc’, from Caravanne du sultan á la Mecque (Vien) 14–16, 15, 26 Europe, allegorical representations of 163–165, 164 Europe Supported by Africa and America (Blake) 163 Execrable Human Traffic (Morland) 129n.10 exoticism 143–144, 145, 151–154 Famiglia Indiana Caraiba (attrib. to Dall’Acqua after Stedman) 57–58, 60 Family of Charaibes in the Island of St. Vincent, A 57, 58, 58–59, 61 Family of Sir William Young, The (Zoffany) 98, 98 feminisation 75, 76, 77–78, 80, 90–91n.92, 179–180n.48 fig leaves 66 Finkelpearl, Tom 238n.19 1st National Hero, Chief of Chiefs (unknown artist) 39, 40

Index Five Years in Trinidad and St. Vincent (Carmichael) 9, 11, 112, 123, 166, 197–198 Fleming, John 17, 19, 21–22 flora Arcadian paradise descriptions 61, 143–144 colonial progress symbolism and use of 144, 171, 173 flower size symbolism 173 landscape depictions of 87n.58 for modesty 66 mulatresses and fruit–body metaphors 144, 148, 149, 159, 165, 167, 168–170, 171 flowers 87n.58, 165, 167, 173 Forrester, Gillian 117 ‘Four Indian Kings’ (Verelst) 83n.11 Four Thousand and One Buttons (exhibition) 236–237n.9 France British relationship with 30–31 Carib relationship with 44, 45, 49, 55, 62, 88n.64 as revolutionary influence 49 Free Natives of Dominica 221, 222 free people of colour Afro-Jamaican performers 113–119 as Brunias’s subject speciality 17–18 citizenship 117 clothing and social status of 94, 194–197, 198, 230 as plantation owners 1–3, 2 provision grounds and freedom purchases 94 social mobility assumptions 231–233 socio-political restrictions on 32n.1 Free Society of Artists 22, 25 Free West Indian Creoles in Elegant Dress 193, 197 Free West Indian Dominicans 94, 95, 195–196 Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape 231, 231–233 French Mulatresses of St. Dominica in their Proper Dress 138, 175n.1

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Index French Mulatress of St. Dominica and a Negro Woman 139, 175n.1 ‘French Set-Girls’ (Belisario) 118, 119 ‘From Beyond the Seas’ (Storm) 149–151 ‘From different Parents, different Climes we came...’ (Bartolozzi) 76–77, 77 fruit Arcadian paradise descriptions 66, 143–144 art representations of 87n.58 commercial exchanges involving 105, 105, 168, 169, 171 mulatresses as colonial visual metaphor 144, 148, 149, 159, 165, 167, 168–170, 171 Gainsborough, Thomas: Watering Place 103 Galatea (mythological figure) 177–178n.27 Galland, Jean Antoine 178n.39 Gardiner, John 14, 36n.44, 91n.95, 175n.1, 211n.7 gaze white colonial 5–6, 11, 117–119, 122 white female 33n.6 white heterosexual male voyeuristic 149, 151, 152–153, 156–157, 162 ‘Gendering the Caribbean Picturesque’ (Mohammed) 140 Gender Trouble (Butler) 214n.45 Gentlemen’s Magazine 93 Geracimos, Ann 215, 220 Global Eighteenth Century, The (Nussbaum) 27 Grainger, William: Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies, The, after Stothard 145, 146, 146–147, 148 Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, Jacques Encyclopédie des voyages illustrations, after Labrousse 227 ‘Nègre et Négresse de Saint-Domingue’, from Encyclopédie des voyages, after Labrousse 227, 229, 230 Graves, Algernon 25 Grignon, Charles Brunias reproductions by 12

Chatoyer the Chief of the Black Caribs in St. Vincent with his Five Wives, after Brunias 39–40, 41 Haiti (formerly St Domingue) anti-colonial revolutions in 49, 215, 218–219, 227 Brunias’s imagery associated with 221, 223, 226, 227, 229, 230 button attribution research 219 Haitian Revolution 49, 215, 218–219, 227 Hakewill, James: Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, A 100 Hamilton, Douglas 30, 33n.11 Hamy, Ernest-Théodore 25 Handkerchief Dance, The 89n.86, 118, 124, 131n.32 Handkerchief Dance on the Island of Dominica African cultural influences 125 architectural styles 122–123 composition and descriptions 92, 109–112, 110, 120 social status indicators 195–196 harem imagery 151–154 Harris, Eileen 20 Harvard University 14, 91n.95, 175n.1, 185 hats 78, 89–90n.86–88, 199–200 headwraps 76, 78, 89–90n.88, 90n.81, 141, 161 Hearne, Thomas 100 Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University 200–201 Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks 211n.6 higgling (huckstering) 94, 198 Hight, Kathryn S. 56 Histoire generale des Antilles habitées par les François (Tertre) 64–66, 65 History, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies (Edwards, B.) 39–40, 44, 56, 82n.5–6, 145, 185 History of Jamaica, The (Long) 71–72, 73, 201–202, 208 Honour, Hugh 128n.9 Honychurch, Lennox Brunias biographical information based on scholarly studies by 17, 26

Brunias Caribbean departure dates 36n.45 Brunias family 23, 36n.48–49 Brunias patron disputes 22 Brunias self-portraits in works 34–35n.22, 135n.70 Carib cultural constructions 61 ‘housekeepers’ 141–142 huckstering 94, 198 Hulme, Peter Carib distinctions, descriptions of 45, 46–47, 54 Carib information sources, assessment of 47 Carib transculturation and colonial anxiety, descriptions of 55, 71, 73 Red Caribs, descriptions of 51 Huth, Hans 16, 25–26 hybridity clothing styles as 74–75, 78, 80, 90n.89, 94–95, 124, 128n.8 colonial perception of 70–72, 73, 75, 80, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 201 cultural 55, 70–71, 112, 123–124 gender ambiguity 76–80 racial 51–52, 70–71 see also mulatresses; mulattoes; racial ambiguity Iconographie des contemporains depuis 1789 jusqu’à 1829 219, 220 ‘Imaginary Orient, The’ (Nochlin) 152 impotence 180n.49 Indians, indigenes, or indigenous people, see Black Caribs; Caribs/Charaibs; Native Americans; Red (Yellow) Caribs individualisation of figures 66, 67, 114, 123, 125 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique: Turkish Bath 152 Inkle and Yarico (tale) 85n.24 inscriptions 143, 177n.14 interracial relationships bestiality comparisons 180n.49 Brunias’s family 23

Index Carib racial hybridity due to 50–52, 70–71, 72 casta paintings addressing 186–187 colonial perception of 72, 159, 186, 208 fruit and sexuality analogies 168–169 mulatress depictions as underscoring 148–149, 202 poems featuring 145–146 slavery and sexual exploitation 40, 140–142, 147 see also mulatresses; mulattoes Jamaica artists of 99, 100, 113–115 black performers 78–80, 79, 113–119, 116, 119 colonial racial perceptions 71–72 Jewish populations in 114–115 pastoral plantation landscapes 100–104, 102, 106–107, 129n.14 provision grounds practices 128n5 jewellery 70, 95, 166, 184, 198 Jews 4, 114–115 Jones v. State 190–191 Jonkonnu festivals 78–80, 113, 126 Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 26 juba (Afro-Creole dance) 134n.63 Katzew, Ilona 211n.11 Kedleston Hall 21–22, 22 Kent, Kathryn 236–237n.9 Kidd, Joseph 129n.14 Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Spring, Virginia (Mayr) 120, 121, 123–124, 132n.33 ‘Koo, Koo, or Actor-Boy’ (plate 5/fig. 17) (Belisario) 78–80, 79 ‘Koo, Koo, or Actor-Boy’ (plate 6/fig. 29) (Belisario) 115–117, 116, 134n.59 Krimmel, John Lewis Country Wedding, The 124 Quilting Frolic 134–135n.68 Kriz, Kay Dian Belisario’s black figure representations 117, 132n.44 Black Carib representations 88n.72

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Index Kriz, Kay Dian (cont.) Brunias scholarship studies 27 mulatress figures 8, 12, 27, 140, 170–171, 174, 176n.12, 181n.63 mulatto male representations 179n.48 racially ambiguity 188, 190, 191 viewer perspectives 33n.6 labour artist employment contracts and working conditions 20–21 plantation landscapes and depictions of slavery 23, 93–94, 98, 100–109, 112–113, 127 provision grounds practices 94, 105, 198 Labrousse, L. F.: Encyclopédie des voyages illustrations, Grasset de Saint-Sauveur after 227, 229, 230 lady (terminology usage) 203 Lady and a Mulatress with a Negro Servant Standing in Back, A 205–208, 206, 209 Lady Attended by a Negro Servant, A (or West Indian Creole Woman, with her Black Servant) 193, 195 Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa 167 land ownership 32n.1 landscapes 144, 231 see also plantation landscapes Lawrence, Jacob 219 Le Clerc, Sébastien: ‘Couple Caraïbe des Antilles’, from Histoire generale des Antilles habitées par les François 64–66, 65 Leeward Islands Carib family outside a Hut, A 59 Lerpinière, Daniel engravings after Robertson 100 View in the Island of Jamaica, of Part of the River Cobre near Spanish Town, The, after Robertson 101, 102 lesbianism 152 Lewis, Reina 152 Life in Philadelphia series (Clay) 117 Ligon, Richard 85n.24, 140 Linen Market, Dominica 182, 183, 188, 190–191, 199, 201

Linen Market with a Linen-stall and Vegetable Seller in the West Indies, A 67, 69, 90n.89, 134n.61 Linnaean systems of classification 184, 209 Loix et constitutions des colonies françaises de Amérique sous le vent (Moreau de Saint-Méry, publ.) 221 Long, Edward Afro-Creole dance descriptions 111 interracial sexuality criticism 72, 142, 201–202, 208–209 racial characteristics and causes 71–72 wet nursing practices 208 white racial identity 73, 208–209 white supremacy 118 Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth (Mignard) 161 L’Ouverture, Toussaint biographical information and descriptions 92, 218–219, 220 Brunias’s imagery associated with 233 coat buttons associated with, handpainted 13, 92, 215, 216, 217, 218, 227, 230 descriptions and portraits of 218–219, 220 Ma Commêre 193, 194 Mademoiselle de Clermont en Sultane (Nattier) 153, 154, 178n.37 Magritte, René: Treachery of Images 209 Marino, Giambattista 145 Market Day, Roseau, Dominica 193, 196 market scenes Black Carib depictions in 67, 69 descriptions 94, 105 flora representations 87n.58 landscape settings for 144 mulatresses in 27–28, 69, 131n.29, 176n.5, 193, 196 themes of 4, 11, 93, 94, 104–106 masculinity 76, 87n.57, 179–180n.48 masquerades 16, 78–80, 198–199 Matalon, Aaron and Marjorie 233 mattoutou (Carib wicker stand) 69, 87n.60 Maurin, Nicolas Eustache: ‘Portrait of Toussaint Louverture’ 219, 220

Mayr, Christian Friedrich: Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Spring, Virginia 120, 121, 123–124, 132n.33 McCrea, Rosalie Smith 177–178n.27 McMurray, Joan 34–35n.22, 135n.70 Mellon, Paul 3, 238–239n.25 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 156 Middle Passage 103–104, 146, 146–147 Mignard, Pierre: Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth 161 Milaire, Jean 218, 227 miscegenation, see interracial relationships mixed-race people, see mulatresses; mulattoes modesty 66, 164–165, 181n.63 Mohammed, Patricia 140, 149 molo (African musical instrument) 134n.63 Moreau de Jonnès, Alexandre 51 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric Louis Élie 111, 221, 223 Morland, George abolitionist movement 98 African Hospitality 129n.10 Execrable Human Traffic 129n.10 Mother with her Son and a Pony, A 94–95, 96 Motley, Archibald J., Jr 209 mouina (Carib architecture) 61, 69 mouloutoucou (Carib drink) 87n.60 Mount, William Sidney: Rustic Dance After a Sleigh Ride 124 mulatresses bathing scenes featuring, see Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing as Brunias’s subject speciality 4, 23, 202 clothing styles of 78, 111–112, 138, 139, 173 colonial progress, as symbols of 12, 27, 140, 148–149, 160–161, 170–171, 173, 174–175 as commercial products 131n.29, 137–140, 165, 168–170, 171, 174 commercial trade scenes with 105, 105, 131n.29, 169, 221, 224, 227, 228 complexion protection practices of 200 exoticism of 145, 151–154

Index market scenes with 27–28, 67, 69, 131n.29, 176n.5, 182, 183, 188, 193, 196, 199 in racial studies with servants 193, 195, 203–209, 204, 206, 207 river scenes with 193, 199–201, 200 terminology definition and usage 29, 34n.16 as washerwomen 140, 153, 155, 221, 225, 226 see also racial ambiguity; sexuality; Venuses; Vixens Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing colonial fantasy themes 143, 151, 163 composition and descriptions 137, 147, 153 flora depictions in 87n.58 racial status 157–161 sexuality and consumption analogies 136, 144, 148–153, 162, 165, 169, 171 sources for 147, 148, 151–152, 154–162, 179n.45 Venus iconography 144–149, 163, 165 Mulatress Purchasing Fruit from a Negro Woman* 105, 105, 137–138, 175n.1 mulattoes as Brunias’s subject speciality 4, 23, 202 Carib hybridity 50–52, 70–71 clothing hybridity representing 73–76, 74 male figures, representations of 77–78, 80, 179n.48 plantation owner pictures 1–3, 2 terminology usage and definition 29 see also Afro-Creoles; Black Caribs; mulatresses Mulatto Woman Teaching Needlework to Negro Girls (Wickstead) 129n.13 Mulatto Women on the Banks of the River Roseau, Dominica 193 Musée des Pres de la Patrie (now Musée du Panthéon National) 215 musical instruments 111, 112, 118, 124, 126, 134n.63 ‘Mystery in Miniature, A’ (Geracimos) 215, 220 mythology 143, 154–162, 177–178n.27

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Index Naldini, Giovanni Battista: Diana Surprised by Actaeon 162 Narrative of a Five Years Journey Among the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (Stedman) 57–58, 60, 76–77, 77 Native Americans accoutrements, symbolism of 76, 90–91n.92 chief portraits and status depictions 83n.11 classicisation of 61–62 decimation ideology 56 representation styles of 66 treaty imagery 42–43, 43, 76 Natives Bathing in a River 107, 107 Natives on a Track near a Village 107, 108 Nattier, Jean-Marc: Mademoiselle de Clermont en Sultane 153, 154, 178n.37 natural history as art commission purpose 182–183 artistic conventions of 27, 57–59, 61 as art style description 25, 27, 185 classification systems of 184, 209 eighteenth-century role of 183–184 tropical region narratives 143 see also ethnographic art naturalisation of black people 103–104, 106, 107, 112, 127 ‘Nègre et Négresse de Saint-Domingue’ (Grasset de Saint-Sauveur after Labrousse) 227, 229, 230 negresses bestiality comparisons 180n.49 with mulatresses 139, 175n.1 mulatress transactions with 105, 105, 137–138 sexual exploitation of enslaved women 40, 140–142, 147 as sexual objects 157–159 social constructions of 144–147, 146 St Domingue (Haitian) imagery of 227, 229, 230 terminology usage and definition 29 see also black attendant figures Negroes Dance in the Island of Dominica, A 131n.32, 221, 223

Nelson, Charmaine A. African instruments 111 colonial gaze and affectation 134n.62 interracial sexuality representations 212n.15 landscape art and omissions of slavery 104 market places 94 race and labour comparisons 82–83n.9 Sable Venus social construction 145 shoelessness 89n.87, 128n.8 neoclassicism 18, 21–22, 35n.41 New Cosmetic, or, the Triumph of Beauty, The (Pratt) 202 Noble Savage 61, 64, 66–67 Nochlin, Linda 152 Noyes, Pauline Riggs 218, 236–237n.9, 236n.1 nudity classical art traditions 61–62, 147 Orientalist art traditions 151 recumbent female figures 152, 153–154, 159–160, 161, 162 symbolism of 64, 66, 149 Nugent, Lady Maria 142 nursing, wet 208 Nussbaum, Felicity 27 odalisques 152, 153–154, 159–160, 161, 162 Old Plantation or Plantation Scene (unknown artist/Rose attrib.) 120, 120–123, 125, 129n.12, 131–132n.32–33 Orientalism 151–154, 170 Ovid 156, 162 Pacification with the Maroon Negroes (after Brunias) 44, 82n.6 pages noires, see black attendant figures parasols 182, 199–200 Parish of St Thomas-in-the-Vale 130n.19 Pasternak, Anne 237n.19 Payne, Sir Ralph 37–38n.65 Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, Harvard University 14, 91n.95, 175n.1, 185

pegals (Carib baskets) 40, 69, 75, 226 Petley, Christer 141 Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (Hakewill) 100 Picturing Imperial Power (Tobin, B. F.) 26–27 plantation landscapes black figures in 99–109, 112, 127 purpose of 23, 37n.56 slave labour omissions 23, 93–94, 98, 100 white planters absent from 96, 103 plantations people of colour and ownership of 1–2, 32n.1 provision grounds practices 94, 105, 198 slave leisure activities 11, 92–93, 97, 109–112, 120–127 slave quarters and architectural descriptions 122–124 see also plantation landscapes Plantation Scene (unknown artist/Rose attrib.) 120, 120–123, 125, 129n.12, 131–132n.32–33 Planter and his Wife, with a Servant, A 1–3, 2, 89n.86, 205 planters mixed-race, pictures of 1–3, 2, 89n.86, 205 plantation landscapes and absence of white 96, 103 slave sexual exploitation 40, 140–142, 147 social status of 30 terminology definition and usage 29, 30–31 plantocracy artistic themes supporting 3–4, 7, 10–11, 24, 92–94, 96, 216 racial classification supporting 186 terminology usage and definition 31 Ponce, Nicolas 12, 221, 223, 226, 226–227, 236n.3 Pope-Hennessy, James 10, 93 Portrait of a Lady (Wickstead, attrib.) 160, 160

Index ‘Portrait of Toussaint Louverture’ (Maurin) 219, 220 Portraits des personnages célèbres de la Revolution (Bonneville, publ.) 218 Pratt, Samuel Jackson 202 Pratt, Stephanie 43, 61, 66 primate comparisons 117, 118, 219 primitivism 54, 57, 62, 140 Primrose, Archibald, 5th Earl of Rosebery 238–239n.25 provision grounds 94, 105, 198 Quilley, Geoff 100, 101, 102–103, 106 Quilting Frolic (Krimmel) 134–135n.68 race character-based perceptions of 45–55, 62–66, 70, 73, 80–81 classification and categorisation conventions 6–7, 114, 181–184, 186–188, 193–194 cultural factors influencing 7–8, 53–54, 80 geographic and climate causes of 71–72 immutability theories of 50–51, 73 slavery associated with 45, 50 as social construction 192, 193, 209–210 stereotypical representations of 51, 117–119, 134–135n.68, 219 terminology usage 28–31 wet nursing effects on 213n.39 see also hybridity; interracial relationships; mulatresses; mulattoes; racial ambiguity; whiteness; specific racial classifications racial ambiguity as artistic intention and theme 12, 184–185, 188, 203, 209–210 colonial perceptions of 75, 191, 192, 193, 195, 201 crisis of representation 190–191, 193, 199, 210 market scene figures 182, 188, 190–193, 201 portraits with servants 203–208, 206, 207, 209, 213n.38 river scene figures 199–201

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Index racial typology 6–7, 114, 182–184, 186–188, 193–194, 203, 209 Raphael: Triumph of Galatea 177–178n.27 Recueil de vues des lieux principaux de la colonie françoise de Saint-Domingue (Moreau de Saint-Méry, publ.) 221, 223, 226, 226–227 Red (Yellow) Caribs authenticity of 46, 54–59, 58, 59, 60, 61–62, 64–66, 65, 69–70, 80, 89n.74, 226 Black Carib enslavement by 45, 49, 85–86n.32 as Brunias’s subject speciality 4, 23 character descriptions of 62–66, 65 classicist depictions of 61–62 colonial race perceptions and division distinctions of 45–55, 62–66, 70, 80–81 cultural practices and comparisons 50, 51 engravings of, after Brunias 81n.3 physical descriptions of 50–51 population statistics 51, 55–56, 86n.42 terminology usage and definition 84n.18 treatment of women 82n.5 wartime practices 51 Rembrandt van Rijn: Bathsheba 179n.45 reproductions Encyclopédie des voyages engravings 227, 229, 230 engravers of, list 12 hand-coloured engravings 227, 228 History, civil and commercial engravings 39–40, 41, 44, 81n.3, 82n.6 Matalon/Clunis watercolours 233, 234, 235 overview 12–13, 211n.2 Recueil de vues engravings 221, 223, 226, 226–227 thematic appropriation of 215, 216–217, 227, 230 see also buttons, painted; engravings by Brunias resistance and revolution anti-colonial art themes 64, 215, 227, 228, 230, 232–233

Carib Wars (St Vincent) 39, 42, 44, 47, 49–50, 55 Haitian Revolution 49, 215, 218–219, 227 influences on 49 slave merrymaking vs. agency for 11, 126–127 Ribeiro, Aileen 198 Robert Adam and Kedleston (Harris) 21 Robertson, George art style descriptions and themes 98–107, 112, 127 biographical information 100 exhibitions 102 labour depictions 109 patrons of 100 publications with engravings after 100, 129n.14 Spring Head of the Roaring River 104, 104 View in the Island of Jamaica, of Part of the River Cobre near Spanish Town, A, Lerpinière after 101, 102 Rosa, Gabriella de la 180n.51 Rose, John: Plantation Scene or Old Plantation, unknown artist/attributed to 120, 120–123, 125, 129n.12, 131–132n.32–33 Rosenthal, Angela 8, 191–192, 200 Royal Academy of Arts 22, 24, 25, 83n.10 Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their Work (Graves) 25 Royal Society of Arts 102 Ruotte, Louis Charles Brunias reproductions by 12 West Indian Flower Girl, The, after Brunias 227, 228 Rustic Dance After a Sleigh Ride (Mount) 124 Rykwert, Joseph and Anne 19 Sable Venus 144–147, 146 Sable Venus: An Ode, The (Teale) 145 Said, Edward 151 Saks, Eva 190–191, 192, 193, 209 Salernitano, Masuccio 178n.39

Schaw, Janet 200 Scotland, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (Hamilton) 30, 33n.11 Scott, John 84n.20 Seasons, The (Thomson) 143 self-portraits 34–35n.22, 126, 127, 137, 153 Servants Washing a Deer 97, 128n.8 sexuality colonial fantasy themes 140, 143, 151, 163 mulatresses as commercial products 131n.29, 137–140, 165, 168–170, 171, 174 mulatress social constructions 136, 149–151, 165–175 Orientalism and harem concubinage 153–154 racial status and desirability 157–159 white female gaze 33n.6 white male gaze and voyeurism 149, 151, 152–153, 156–157, 162 see also interracial relationships Shames, Susan 128n.12 Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois 178n.28 She-Devil 145 Shell, Marc 213n.39 shoelessness 75, 89n.87, 95, 125, 128n.8 Sixteen-Mile Walk 130n.19 Sketches of Character (Belisario) artist/audience perspective 11, 114, 115, 117–119, 126 colonial black body depictions 78–80, 114, 117 contents descriptions 113, 115, 117 influences on 113 production descriptions and purpose 113, 117, 132–133n.48–49 ‘Creole Negroes’ 113, 188, 189 ‘French Set-Girls’ 118, 119 ‘Koo, Koo, or Actor-Boy’ (plate 5/fig.17) 78–80, 79 ‘Koo, Koo, or Actor-Boy’ (plate 6/fig.29) 115–117, 116, 133n.59 slaveholders 29 see also planters

Index Slavery, Geography, and Empire (Nelson) 82–83n.9 Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement (Kriz) 27, 176n.5 slavery and enslaved people abolition and emancipation 49, 97, 98, 114–115 agency and independence 11, 94, 119, 124–127 architecture and cultural spaces 122–123 artist employment comparisons 20–21 Black Carib enslavement 45, 49, 85–86n.32 British family portraits featuring 98 clothing styles of 75, 89n.87, 128n.8, 197–198 colonial perception of 11, 96, 109, 112, 123 consumption practices 94, 198 geographic allegories of 163–165 individualisation of figures 67, 114, 123, 125 leisure and cultural activities 11, 92–93, 109–112, 120–127 market scenes and commerce themes with 4, 11, 93, 94, 104–106, 198 Orientalism and harem comparisons 152, 153 plantation landscapes and absence of 23, 93, 98, 100, 113 plantation landscapes with 101–104, 106–107, 109, 112 plantocratic propaganda supporting 3–4, 7, 10–11, 24, 92–94 provision ground practices 94, 105, 198 racial perceptions influenced by 8, 45, 48–49 sexual exploitation of female 40, 140–142, 147 slave trade 103–104, 129n.10, 146, 146–147 terminology usage and preference 29 see also black attendant figures; washerwomen

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Index Smithsonian Magazine 215 Snyder, Holly 114 social class and status casta painting and text descriptions 186 clothing styles as indication of 75, 89n.87, 94–95, 197–198, 197–199 colonial perceptions and threats to 196, 198, 201–202 Four Indian Kings portraits 83n.11 physical size as indication of 42 of planters 30 posture as indication of 75–76 stock characters and ambiguity of 195–196 thematic appropriations as examples of 232–233 see also free people of colour; slavery and enslaved people Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade 129n.10 Society of Artists 25, 129n.13 Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760–1791 [and the] Free Society of Artists, 1761–1783 25 Society of Arts 22 Sow, Ousmane 219 Spring Head of the Roaring River (Robertson) 104, 104 staffage 101–104 State, Jones v. 190–191 St Domingue, see Haiti Stedman, John Gabriel Bartolozzi portraits of 76–77, 77 Famiglia Indiana Caraiba, attributed to Dall’Acqua, after 57–58, 60 stock characters 193, 199, 203 Stoler, Ann 213n.39 Storm, Theodor 149–151 Stothard, Thomas Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies, The, Grainger after 145, 146, 146–147, 148 St Vincent 39–40, 44, 49–50, 55 see also Black Caribs; Caribs/Charaibs; Red (Yellow) Caribs St Vincent Botanical Gardens 24, 185

taboui (Carib architecture) 61, 69 ‘Taxonomy and Agency in Brunias’s West Indian Paintings’ (Tobin) 182 Taylor, Simon 141 Teale, Isaac 145 Ten Views in Antigua (Clark) 82–83n.9 Tertre, Jean-Baptiste du 64–66, 65 textual additions to images 143, 177n.14, 186, 188, 221 thematic appropriation anti-colonialist resistance and liberation 215, 227, 228, 230, 232–233 racial diversity 216–217, 230–232 social status and agency of women of colour 232–233 Thistlewood, Thomas 141–142 Thompson, Robert Farris 3, 33n.4, 111 Thomson, James 143 Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha 33n.5, 230 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio): Diana Surprised by Actaeon 157–158, 158, 161 Tobias and the Angel 18 Tobin, Beth Fowkes Carib cultural cross-dressing 90n.89 costumes as subversion 26–27 mulatresses and sexual overtones 137–138 Native American exchange imagery and symbolism 90–91n.92 natural history 183–184 racial status and female identity 179n.46 tropics, descriptions of 143 white racial identification 182, 190 Tobin, John 93 Toussaint, François-Dominique, see L’Ouverture, Toussaint travel narratives 143, 183 Treachery of Images (Magritte) 209 Treaty between the British and the Black Caribs* 40–44, 42 Tregear, Gabriel: Black Jokes, Being a Series of Laughable Caricatures on the March of Manners Amongst Blacks 117 Triumph of Galatea (Raphael) 177–178n.27 True & Exact History of Barbadoes, A (Ligon) 85n.24 Turkish Bath (Ingres) 152

Two Ladies Attended by a Negro Servant 203, 204 Two Mulatresses and a Child with a Black Woman Selling Fruit* 168–171, 169 urbanisation 113, 143, 165, 171, 173, 174 veils 199–200 Venuses artistic traditions of 143, 147, 148, 151–154, 157 background settings for 136, 144, 148–149, 165 racially transformed 144–149, 146 symbolism of 142, 145, 147–148, 150–151, 175 Verelst, John: ‘Four Indian Kings’ 83n.11 Vien, Joseph: ‘Eunuque Blanc’, from Caravanne du sultan á la Mecque 14–16, 15, 26 View in the Island of Jamaica, of Part of the River Cobre near Spanish Town, The (Lerpinière after Robertson) 101, 102 View of Roseau Valley, Island of Dominica, Showing Africans, Carib Indians, and Creole Planters 180n.49, 199–201, 200 View on the River Roseau, Dominica (formerly American Plantation) 25, 107, 108 Vixens artistic representations and descriptions of 165–174, 205, 231 background settings for 165, 171, 174 European traditions influencing 143, 165, 171, 173 geographic allegories as 165 symbolism of 142, 147, 166–167, 174–175 Vöelkertafel (unknown artist) 53, 53 Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies, The (Grainger after Stothard) 145, 146, 146–147, 148 voyeurism 149, 151, 152–153, 156–157, 162 washerwomen (blanchisseuses) on button imagery 215, 226–227

Index engravings of 221, 225, 226, 236n.3 leisure vs. labour portrayals 93–94 paintings of 140, 153, 155 terminology usage and definition 236n.3 Watering Place (Gainsborough) 103 Wayne, Cynthia 201 weapons, as accessories 76, 89n.87, 90–91n.92 wedding scenes 120, 120, 121, 123, 132n.33 West, Benjamin Native American classicisation 62 William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians 42–43, 43, 76, 90–91n.92 West India Flower Girl 221 West India Flower Girl, The (Ruotte after Brunias) 227, 228 West Indian Creole Woman, with her Black Servant 193, 195 West Indian Dandy and Two Ladies, A (or Free West Indian Dominicans) 94, 95, 195–196 West Indian Flower Girl and Two other Free Women of Color, A 172, 172–174, 221, 231 West Indian Man of Color, Directing Two Carib Women with a Child 73–78, 74, 89n.74 West India Washerwomen (painting) 93–94, 140, 153, 155 West India Washer-Women, The (print) 221, 225, 226, 236n.3 wet nursing 208 Wheeler, Roxann 7–8, 53–54, 85n.24 White, Graham 196–197 White, John 56, 61, 87n.56 White, Shane 196–197 white Creoles complexion protection practices of 200 physical racial distinctions and causes 71–72 racial/cultural perception and criticism of 89n.85 terminology definition and usage 30 wet nursing practices of 208

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Index white men plantation landscapes devoid of 96, 103 slavery and sexual exploitation 40, 140–142, 147 voyeurism and white male gaze 149, 151, 152–153, 156–157, 162 see also interracial relationships whiteness (white racial identity) accessories accentuating 156, 159, 161–162, 170, 191, 192 artists’ techniques for underscoring 156–157, 159, 191, 192 Britishness associated with 8 colonial perception of 7–8, 30–31, 50, 70–71, 73, 118 colonial progress and refinement as 171 instability of 202 racial ambiguity and crisis of representation 160, 182, 190–191, 200–201 threats to 71–72, 208 see also white Creoles; white men; white women white supremacy 7–8, 30–31, 118 white women black attendant figures with 153, 154, 161–162, 170, 191–192 as Brunias’s subjects 202 character descriptions and comparisons of 161 complexion protection practices 199–200 gaze of 33n.6 portraits of 160, 160, 161, 191, 192 race representation and gender identity 210 racial ambiguity and crisis of representation 160, 182, 190–191, 200–201 terminology used for 203 wet nurses and identity of 208

Wickstead, Philip art subject specialities 99, 129n.13 biographical information 129n.13 Mulatto Woman Teaching Needlework to Negro Girls 129n.13 patrons of 129n.13 Portrait of a Lady, attributed to 160, 160 William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (West) 42–43, 43, 76, 90–91n.92 Williams, Carla 170 Willis, Deborah 170 Wilson, Kathleen 8, 130n.19 Winterer, Caroline 153 Wood, Marcus 91n.94, 147 Yale Center for British Art 1, 3, 4, 5, 33n.7, 238–239n.25 Yarico 85n.24 Yellow Caribs, see Red (Yellow) Caribs Young, Sir William, 1st Baronet biographical information 22–23, 219 Black Carib leaders, descriptions 82n.8 Brunias’s inheritance from 23 dances by enslaved people, descriptions of 112, 123 family portraits of 98, 98 painted button provenance and travels of 219 patronage of 3, 22, 47 see also Account of the Black Charaibs Young, Sir William, 2nd Baronet biographical information 23, 36n.44 black architecture in St Vincent, descriptions 122 father’s Black Carib text published by 47, 84–85n.22, 96 slavery perceptions of 11, 109 Zoffany, Johann: Family of Sir William Young, The 98, 98