Rethinking Art's Histories Colouring the Caribbean

The first monographic study of the painter Agostino Brunias, this book offers a compelling, original analysis of his representation of race in the British colonial West Indies, reconsidering the way in which the artist’s oeuvre has previously been understood. 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 – so called ‘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 inchoate notions of race. Perceived as straightforward documents of visual ethnography, Brunias’s paintings have been used 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.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. 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.