Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape
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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.
Object Label
Commissioned by the British government, the Italian artist Agostino Brunias created a series of paintings capturing the complex social and racial hierarchies of plantation life on the newly acquired British island of Dominica. Here, on the grounds of a sugar plantation, two mixed-race sisters wearing European-style clothing appear at center alongside their mother (at left), two children, and eight African servants. Brunias signaled the women’s elite status based on subtleties of skin color and dress, as well as space, foregrounding them in a position typically occupied by white settlers in traditional British “conversation pieces” (informal group portraits). While this idyllic scene seemingly endorses the cultural and racial hybridity of the region, it also projects a colonial fantasy that erases enslaved labor.
Caption
Agostino Brunias (Italian, ca. 1730–1796). Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape, ca. 1770–1796. Oil on canvas, 20 x 26 1/8 in. (50.8 x 66.4 cm) frame: 25 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 2 1/2 in. (64.8 x 80 x 6.4 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. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
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Collection
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Artist
Title
Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape
Date
ca. 1770–1796
Medium
Oil on canvas
Classification
Dimensions
20 x 26 1/8 in. (50.8 x 66.4 cm) frame: 25 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 2 1/2 in. (64.8 x 80 x 6.4 cm)
Credit Line
Gift of Mrs. Carll H. de Silver in memory of her husband, by exchange and gift of George S. Hellman, by exchange
Accession Number
2010.59
Rights
No known copyright restrictions
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