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Lot Essay
Agostino Brunias holds a singular and much-discussed role in the ongoing reconsideration of European depictions of Black and mixed-race subjects in painting. His paintings raise questions about the intended and real-world effects that works of art had on the dominant attitudes that a White majority – especially in Britain – held toward slavery, colonialism and plantation culture in the Caribbean in the final decades of the eighteenth century. The Italian-born and trained artist moved to England while in his twenties to paint decorative canvases in the workshop of the fashionable Scottish architect Robert Adam (1728-1792), before moving to the British West Indies in 1764. Living principally on the island of Dominica, Brunias was commissioned by plantation owners to paint group portraits of their families and bucolic depictions of their lands, but he also created several important series of genre scenes featuring free people of color engaging in daily life in the West Indies, images that provide invaluable – sometimes unique – insights into indigenous Caribbean culture during the colonial period.
Although Brunias’s paintings of West Indian subjects are widely represented in major museums around the world – including fine examples in the Tate, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Art Institute of Chicago, Peabody Essex Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon was an active collector of Brunias’s pictures) and the Brooklyn Museum – until recently, relatively little was known of Brunias’s biography, including his correct name and country of origin. (Mistaken early accounts differ in giving his first name as Augustine, Auguste, Alexander and Abraham; his surname as ‘Brunais’ and ‘Brunyas’; his nationality as French.) In fact, Brunias was born in Rome around 1730 and reared and trained in the city. He attended the Accademia di San Luca, where he won third prize in a painting competition for his canvas of Tobias and the Angel (lost). As an Italian, Brunias was not a pensionnaire of the French Academy in Rome, but he had friendships with many of the French students and participated in the famous ‘Turkish Mascarade’ that they organized in 1748. Dressed in ‘Turkish’ costumes, the students marched in a celebratory procession through the streets of the city; the only known portrait of the artist is a drawing by the history painter Joseph-Marie Vien (1716-1809), memorializing Brunias in his costume as ‘The White Eunuch’ (fig. 1; Petit Palais, Paris).
Soon thereafter, Brunias was making his living as a journeyman painter supplying souvenir pictures for wealthy Europeans stopping in Rome on the Grand Tour, when his talents as a figure painter were discovered by Robert Adam, himself on an Italian sojourn. Adam, who is recognized as one of Britain’s most original architects and principal innovator of British neoclassical design, hired Brunias to accompany him on his travels throughout Italy in 1756-57 to make drawings of the antique ruins, classical decorative motifs and architectural details that he would later incorporate into his own architectural designs when he returned to London. Adam initially employed Brunias in his workshop in Rome, but the artist accompanied Adam on his return to Britain in 1758, where he collaborated closely with the architect on many of Adam’s domestic building projects, including painting the decorations for the breakfast room at Kedleston Hall (five paintings, today in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London). Acknowledged as a brilliant and distinctive draftsman and colorist, Brunias would import the highly saturated hues that he developed for his work at Kedleston – vivid blues, citrus yellows, coral reds – into the color palette of his Caribbean compositions.
Adam was a demanding employer who placed his foreign-born assistants under long-term contracts that severely restricted their ability to work on any projects outside the Adam workshop, terms that another assistant in the shop claimed (hyperbolically) ‘made him a slave’. Chafing under these limitations, Brunias left Adam’s employ when his contract ended and departed London at the end of 1764 for the West Indies, under the employ of Sir William Young (1724-1788). Young was the newly-appointed ‘President for the Commission for the Sale of Ceded Lands in Dominica, Saint Vincent, Grenada and Tobago’, following the conclusion of the Seven Years War. With the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended hostilities, a defeated France ceded control of the territories of the Lesser Antilles to the victorious British crown. Young was subsequently appointed Lieutenant Governor of Dominica, then Governor of the island. The two men established themselves in residences in Roseau, Dominica’s capital, and Young remained Brunias’s principal patron until 1773, when the diplomat returned home to England.
Young’s position afforded Brunias the opportunity to travel widely throughout the West Indies, and introduced him to indigenous Carib life and evolving Creole cultures, which would become the subject matter of his paintings for the rest of his career. These travels inspired his 1765 painting The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl (lost), which proved a popular success when he reproduced it in 1779 in a widely disseminated color engraving (fig. 2). That picture also seems to have established the model which Brunias would follow, successfully, for many of his compositions henceforth: small-scale, vertical paintings produced in sets of six or eight identically sized canvases, depicting indigenous Caribbeans of color wearing elegantly rendered, traditional local costume. These small paintings generally include three or four graceful figures engaged in conversation, or in enjoyable or mundane daily activities such as shopping, bathing or promenading, and their settings are most often tropical landscapes or village markets. The compositions reflect popular European genre paintings of the era, such as the British ‘Conversation Piece’ or ‘Fashion Plate’, or the French ‘Tableau de Mode’ and ‘Fete Galante’, and differ little from their European counterparts except in the figures Brunias depicts, almost all of whom are Black or mixed-race. His paintings are notable for their appealing depictions of free men and women of color, many prosperous and privileged, in communities markedly free of the restraints of rigid racial hierarchies.
The present paintings form what appears to be a rare, complete set of Brunias’s West Indies genre scenes to have come down to us intact and in their original frames. Three of the six pictures depict groups of local women of color in Dominica – some with their children, some with servants – strolling in the afternoon sun or selling fruit and flowers; in each, Brunias places great emphasis on the warm, bright landscape settings and colorful, meticulously rendered regional costumes. Another painting includes five women, in various states of undress, bathing in a stream. A fifth picture seems to depict an imposingly self-possessed woman promenading with her fashionable young husband and their elegantly attired son. A final canvas – anomalous in the series – shows a native family of the island of St. Vincent, distinguishable by their darker skin and distinctive dress. Each painting is notable for its brilliant palette and precise rendering of local costume. But each is equally striking in its keen observations of the fine-drawn colonial class distinctions evident in the subjects’ social relations and interactions, and the rendering – with great nuance – of the subtle gradations of skin color among his models, all of whom are people of color.
The principle buyers for Brunias’s paintings were White European planters, often absentee landlords living in Britain. In addition to Young, Brunias dedicated prints that he made to other owners of large sugar plantations, including Sir Ralph Payne (1739-1807) and Sir Patrick Blake (c. 1742-1784), suggesting that these men were also among his patrons. His works have been criticized for romanticizing plantation life and obscuring – or ignoring – the harsh realities of slavery in the West Indies, in favor of happy scenes of free people of color thriving in a world of social harmony, and for serving to alleviate the consciences of colonial patrons and justify the practices of those who built their fortunes on plantation slavery. Other, more sympathetic writers have observed that Brunias’s pictures may have played a more subversive role in undermining British resistance to the abolition of slavery at the very moment the Abolitionist Movement was gaining support in Britain in the 1770s. Paintings such as the present series expose the artificiality of traditional prohibitions on interracial sexual relationships and long-established racial hierarchies as observed by British society in the West Indies – Mia L. Bagneris has noted that ‘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…’. Others have read Brunias’s paintings as envisioning and endorsing a free West Indian society absent of slavery, with David Bindman observing that Brunias’s works ‘show racial mixture as natural and positive.’
On this point, it is telling to note that a contemporary enthusiast of Brunias’s works was Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803), father of the Haitian slave rebellion and leader of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-94. During the Revolution, Louverture wore eighteen buttons on his waistcoat which were each decorated with different hand-painted miniatures of Brunias’s West Indian scenes, which survive today in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York (fig. 3). The buttons, which are executed in gouache on tin, are based on known engravings by Brunias; it is not known if Brunias painted them himself.
Brunias started a family in Roseau in the mid-1770s with a free woman of color. Baptismal records document the christening of ‘Edward and Augustin two illegitimate children born on 1st October 1774 of Louis Bruneas and a free mulatto woman.’ (Once again, misunderstandings abound in the recording of his name.) Dominican tax records from 1827 document the existence of a small plantation owned by a mulatto woman named Elizabeth Brunias, either the artist’s widow or a daughter. The numerous members of the Bruney family, living in Dominica to this day, trace their origins to the artist.
Shortly after the birth of his children, Brunias returned to England around 1775-76, apparently to promote and sell his work there. In 1777 and 1779, three of his West Indian paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. He also published a series of stipple engravings ‘by his own hand’ reproducing his Caribbean pictures for popular consumption, and created wall paintings of Caribbean subjects for the library at Stowe House, Buckinghamshire. With a commission in hand for botanical drawings for the St. Vincent Botanical Gardens, Brunias returned in 1784 to his family in the West Indies and remained there until his death in 1796. He died at home in Roseau, Dominica, at the age of 66, his wife and children at his side. He is buried in the Catholic Cemetery at the present-day Roseau Cathedral.
Although Brunias’s paintings of West Indian subjects are widely represented in major museums around the world – including fine examples in the Tate, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Art Institute of Chicago, Peabody Essex Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon was an active collector of Brunias’s pictures) and the Brooklyn Museum – until recently, relatively little was known of Brunias’s biography, including his correct name and country of origin. (Mistaken early accounts differ in giving his first name as Augustine, Auguste, Alexander and Abraham; his surname as ‘Brunais’ and ‘Brunyas’; his nationality as French.) In fact, Brunias was born in Rome around 1730 and reared and trained in the city. He attended the Accademia di San Luca, where he won third prize in a painting competition for his canvas of Tobias and the Angel (lost). As an Italian, Brunias was not a pensionnaire of the French Academy in Rome, but he had friendships with many of the French students and participated in the famous ‘Turkish Mascarade’ that they organized in 1748. Dressed in ‘Turkish’ costumes, the students marched in a celebratory procession through the streets of the city; the only known portrait of the artist is a drawing by the history painter Joseph-Marie Vien (1716-1809), memorializing Brunias in his costume as ‘The White Eunuch’ (fig. 1; Petit Palais, Paris).
Soon thereafter, Brunias was making his living as a journeyman painter supplying souvenir pictures for wealthy Europeans stopping in Rome on the Grand Tour, when his talents as a figure painter were discovered by Robert Adam, himself on an Italian sojourn. Adam, who is recognized as one of Britain’s most original architects and principal innovator of British neoclassical design, hired Brunias to accompany him on his travels throughout Italy in 1756-57 to make drawings of the antique ruins, classical decorative motifs and architectural details that he would later incorporate into his own architectural designs when he returned to London. Adam initially employed Brunias in his workshop in Rome, but the artist accompanied Adam on his return to Britain in 1758, where he collaborated closely with the architect on many of Adam’s domestic building projects, including painting the decorations for the breakfast room at Kedleston Hall (five paintings, today in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London). Acknowledged as a brilliant and distinctive draftsman and colorist, Brunias would import the highly saturated hues that he developed for his work at Kedleston – vivid blues, citrus yellows, coral reds – into the color palette of his Caribbean compositions.
Adam was a demanding employer who placed his foreign-born assistants under long-term contracts that severely restricted their ability to work on any projects outside the Adam workshop, terms that another assistant in the shop claimed (hyperbolically) ‘made him a slave’. Chafing under these limitations, Brunias left Adam’s employ when his contract ended and departed London at the end of 1764 for the West Indies, under the employ of Sir William Young (1724-1788). Young was the newly-appointed ‘President for the Commission for the Sale of Ceded Lands in Dominica, Saint Vincent, Grenada and Tobago’, following the conclusion of the Seven Years War. With the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended hostilities, a defeated France ceded control of the territories of the Lesser Antilles to the victorious British crown. Young was subsequently appointed Lieutenant Governor of Dominica, then Governor of the island. The two men established themselves in residences in Roseau, Dominica’s capital, and Young remained Brunias’s principal patron until 1773, when the diplomat returned home to England.
Young’s position afforded Brunias the opportunity to travel widely throughout the West Indies, and introduced him to indigenous Carib life and evolving Creole cultures, which would become the subject matter of his paintings for the rest of his career. These travels inspired his 1765 painting The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl (lost), which proved a popular success when he reproduced it in 1779 in a widely disseminated color engraving (fig. 2). That picture also seems to have established the model which Brunias would follow, successfully, for many of his compositions henceforth: small-scale, vertical paintings produced in sets of six or eight identically sized canvases, depicting indigenous Caribbeans of color wearing elegantly rendered, traditional local costume. These small paintings generally include three or four graceful figures engaged in conversation, or in enjoyable or mundane daily activities such as shopping, bathing or promenading, and their settings are most often tropical landscapes or village markets. The compositions reflect popular European genre paintings of the era, such as the British ‘Conversation Piece’ or ‘Fashion Plate’, or the French ‘Tableau de Mode’ and ‘Fete Galante’, and differ little from their European counterparts except in the figures Brunias depicts, almost all of whom are Black or mixed-race. His paintings are notable for their appealing depictions of free men and women of color, many prosperous and privileged, in communities markedly free of the restraints of rigid racial hierarchies.
The present paintings form what appears to be a rare, complete set of Brunias’s West Indies genre scenes to have come down to us intact and in their original frames. Three of the six pictures depict groups of local women of color in Dominica – some with their children, some with servants – strolling in the afternoon sun or selling fruit and flowers; in each, Brunias places great emphasis on the warm, bright landscape settings and colorful, meticulously rendered regional costumes. Another painting includes five women, in various states of undress, bathing in a stream. A fifth picture seems to depict an imposingly self-possessed woman promenading with her fashionable young husband and their elegantly attired son. A final canvas – anomalous in the series – shows a native family of the island of St. Vincent, distinguishable by their darker skin and distinctive dress. Each painting is notable for its brilliant palette and precise rendering of local costume. But each is equally striking in its keen observations of the fine-drawn colonial class distinctions evident in the subjects’ social relations and interactions, and the rendering – with great nuance – of the subtle gradations of skin color among his models, all of whom are people of color.
The principle buyers for Brunias’s paintings were White European planters, often absentee landlords living in Britain. In addition to Young, Brunias dedicated prints that he made to other owners of large sugar plantations, including Sir Ralph Payne (1739-1807) and Sir Patrick Blake (c. 1742-1784), suggesting that these men were also among his patrons. His works have been criticized for romanticizing plantation life and obscuring – or ignoring – the harsh realities of slavery in the West Indies, in favor of happy scenes of free people of color thriving in a world of social harmony, and for serving to alleviate the consciences of colonial patrons and justify the practices of those who built their fortunes on plantation slavery. Other, more sympathetic writers have observed that Brunias’s pictures may have played a more subversive role in undermining British resistance to the abolition of slavery at the very moment the Abolitionist Movement was gaining support in Britain in the 1770s. Paintings such as the present series expose the artificiality of traditional prohibitions on interracial sexual relationships and long-established racial hierarchies as observed by British society in the West Indies – Mia L. Bagneris has noted that ‘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…’. Others have read Brunias’s paintings as envisioning and endorsing a free West Indian society absent of slavery, with David Bindman observing that Brunias’s works ‘show racial mixture as natural and positive.’
On this point, it is telling to note that a contemporary enthusiast of Brunias’s works was Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803), father of the Haitian slave rebellion and leader of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-94. During the Revolution, Louverture wore eighteen buttons on his waistcoat which were each decorated with different hand-painted miniatures of Brunias’s West Indian scenes, which survive today in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York (fig. 3). The buttons, which are executed in gouache on tin, are based on known engravings by Brunias; it is not known if Brunias painted them himself.
Brunias started a family in Roseau in the mid-1770s with a free woman of color. Baptismal records document the christening of ‘Edward and Augustin two illegitimate children born on 1st October 1774 of Louis Bruneas and a free mulatto woman.’ (Once again, misunderstandings abound in the recording of his name.) Dominican tax records from 1827 document the existence of a small plantation owned by a mulatto woman named Elizabeth Brunias, either the artist’s widow or a daughter. The numerous members of the Bruney family, living in Dominica to this day, trace their origins to the artist.
Shortly after the birth of his children, Brunias returned to England around 1775-76, apparently to promote and sell his work there. In 1777 and 1779, three of his West Indian paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. He also published a series of stipple engravings ‘by his own hand’ reproducing his Caribbean pictures for popular consumption, and created wall paintings of Caribbean subjects for the library at Stowe House, Buckinghamshire. With a commission in hand for botanical drawings for the St. Vincent Botanical Gardens, Brunias returned in 1784 to his family in the West Indies and remained there until his death in 1796. He died at home in Roseau, Dominica, at the age of 66, his wife and children at his side. He is buried in the Catholic Cemetery at the present-day Roseau Cathedral.