Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the art of Agostino Brunias

By Mia L. Bagneris

Colouring the Caribbean offers the first comprehensive study of Agostino Brunias’s intriguing pictures of colonial West Indians of colour – so called ‘Red’ and ‘Black’ Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race – made for colonial officials and plantocratic elites during the late-eighteenth century. Although Brunias’s paintings have often been understood as straightforward documents of visual ethnography that functioned as field guides for reading race, this book investigates how the images both reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by eighteenth-century Britons, helping to construct racial categories while simultaneously exposing their constructedness and underscoring their contradictions. The book offers provocative new insights about Brunias’s work gleaned from a broad survey of his paintings, many of which are reproduced here for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781526120472

Mia L. Bagneris

Mia L. Bagneris is Jesse Poesch Junior Professor of Art History at Tulane University

Book preview

Colouring the Caribbean

SERIES EDITORS

Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon

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

These books will acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on our understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of worldwide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas across national and continental borders.

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The face of medicine: Visualising medical masculinities in late nineteenth-century Paris   Mary Hunter

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The synthetic proposition: Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art   Nizan Shaked

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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

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

2  Merry and contented slaves and other island myths: representing Africans and Afro-Creoles in the Anglo-American world

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

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

Index

Figures

1.  Agostino Brunias, A Planter and his Wife, with a Servant, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

2.  Joseph Vien, ‘Eunuque Blanc’, etching from Caravanne du sultan à la Mecque, mascarade turque donnée 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

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

4.  Unknown artist, 1st National Hero, Chief of Chiefs, c. 2000, photo courtesy of Dr Lennox Honychurch

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

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

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)

8.  Unknown artist, Vöelkertafel, mid-eighteenth century, courtesy of the Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art, Vienna, Austria

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

10.  Agostino Brunias, A Leeward Islands Carib family outside a Hut, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

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

12.  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). 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

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

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

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

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 University

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

18.  Agostino Brunias, Free West Indian Dominicans, c. 1770, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

19.  Agostino Brunias, A Mother with her Son and a Pony, c. 1775, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

20.  Agostino Brunias, Servants Washing a Deer, c. 1775, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

21.  Johann Zoffany, The Family of Sir William Young, c. 1767–69, oil on canvas, courtesy of the Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool

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

23.  George Robertson, Spring Head of the Roaring River, 1775, Wallace Campbell Collections, Kingston, Jamaica, photo: Franz Marzouca, courtesy of Wallace Campbell Collections

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)

25.  Agostino Brunias, Natives Bathing in a River, n.d., private collection, photo courtesy of Sotheby’s

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

27.  Agostino Brunias, Natives on a Track near a Village, n.d., private collection, photo courtesy of Sotheby’s

28.  Agostino Brunias, Handkerchief Dance on the Island of Dominica, n.d., private collection, photo: Simon Dickinson Ltd

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

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

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

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

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-Bornemisza

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

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)

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)

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)

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

39.  Jean-Marc Nattier, Mademoiselle de Clermont en Sultane, 1733 © The Wallace Collection, London

40.  Agostino Brunias, West India Washerwomen, c. 1779, National Library of Jamaica, photo courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica

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

42.  Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Diana Surprised by Actaeon, 1559, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY

43.  Attributed to Philip Wickstead, Portrait of a Lady, n.d., private collection, photo © Christie’s Images Ltd

44.  William Blake, Europe Supported by Africa and America, 1792, courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

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

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

47.  Agostino Brunias, Linen Market, Dominica, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

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

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

50.  Agostino Brunias, Ma Commêre, n.d., private collection, photo © Christie’s Images Ltd

51.  Agostino Brunias, West Indian Creole Woman, with her Black Servant, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

52.  Agostino Brunias, Market Day, Roseau, Dominica, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

53.  Agostino Brunias, Free West Indian Creoles in Elegant Dress, c. 1780, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

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

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

56.  Agostino Brunias, A Lady and a Mulatress with a Negro Servant Standing in Back, n.d., private collection, photo © Christie’s Images Ltd, courtesy of the Photographic Archive at the Yale Center for British Art

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

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

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

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 Collection

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

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

63.  Print made by Agostino Brunias, The West India Washer-Women, 1779, stipple engraving and etching on moderately thick, moderately textured, beige wove paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

64.  Nicolas Ponce after Agostino Brunias, illustrations from Recueil de vues des lieux principaux de la colonie françoise de Saint-Domingue…, 1791, courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

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

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

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

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

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 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 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.

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 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 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

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

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, 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