Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape

About this Brooklyn Icon

The Brooklyn Museum is commemorating its 200th anniversary by spotlighting 200 standout objects in its encyclopedic collection.

Sir William Young, the British governor of Dominica in the late 18th century, brought Agostino Brunias to the Caribbean as his personal artist. Adapting the style of traditional European “conversation pieces” (informal group portraits of white aristocrats), Brunias’s commissioned, picturesque images of Caribbean life under colonialism obscured the violence of empire and slavery. In this example, Brunias depicts free and enslaved people who lived in Dominica under Britain’s colonial rule. Their skin tones and dress represent “types” of people, alluding to the island’s social, racial, and economic hierarchies that defined relations between white Europeans and people of African, Afro-Creole, Carib, or mixed-race descent.

Brunias’s paintings coincide with the historical moment when skin color and other visual and sartorial markers were becoming signifiers of human differences. Even as these images were created to affirm 18th-century British racial and social boundaries in the colonies, they reveal the contradiction and instability of those ideas. The artist’s undermining of the very concept of racial fixity, and visualization of race as fluid and socially constructed, may make this painting particularly resonant with its viewers in Brooklyn, one of the most culturally and racially diverse places in the world.