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

The concluding chapter reiterates the major contentions of the previous chapters and examines the diverse ends to which Brunias’s images have been appropriated almost from the very moment of their creation. It opens with an investigation of a set of painted buttons in the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum that have been attributed to Brunias and are purported to have adorned the coat of Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the successful Haitian slave rebellion against France. Ultimately, the chapter asserts that the fact Brunias’s work can be simultaneously described as plantocratic propaganda and as fashion fit for a Haitian revolutionary points to its complexity and continuing historical importance.

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

This chapter considers how Brunias’s Carib pictures visually reinforced the insistent – and largely imagined – distinction between so-called ‘Red’ and ‘Black’ Carib Indians made by British colonialists. Though there were certainly genotypic and phenotypic differences among various Carib communities, the British exaggerated the substance and significance of these differences in order to serve their own colonial interests. Brunias’s pictures supported these exaggerations, fuelling perceptions of Black Caribs as a problematic entity in the colonial world and creating a visual narrative to justify the solutions the British used to deal with them. However, careful analysis reveals the extent to which these works simultaneously underscore the problematic nature of the racial and cultural distinctions they aim to reify, pointing to deeply felt cultural anxieties about the hybrid character of colonial life.

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....

Can you find the white woman in this picture? Brunias’s ‘ladies’ of ambiguous race

Taking a more theoretical approach, this chapter explores Brunias’s depiction of racially ambiguous bodies. It offers an in-depth investigation of the ways in which the subtext of the artist’s work subtly undermined the fixed racial categories. Presaging constructionist theories of racial identity, these works point to the dilemmas of visualising ‘race’ in the Anglo-American world, gesturing toward ‘race’ as a category inextricably rooted in visual knowledge yet incapable of being sustained by it.

Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana: mixed-race Venuses and Vixens as the fruits of imperial enterprise

Brunias is most famous for his images of mixed-race women. This chapter considers the virtual omnipresence of the ‘mulatress’ in the artist’s Caribbean pictures. K. Dian Kriz has argued that the ambiguous racial and social status of the mulatress figures served as a visual metaphor allowing Brunias to capture the state of the colonial West Indies – a locale popularly associated with laziness, leisure, luxury, licentiousness, and other forms of moral laxity. Building on Kriz’s work, the chapter asserts that the mulatress appealed to Brunias because of her ability to represent both the baser pleasures and profits to be taken in the Caribbean and the islands’ potential to conform to British ideals of societal refinement.

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

The chapter analyses the depiction – or lack thereof – of Africans and Afro-Creoles in British colonial art of the West Indies. It places Brunias within the context of other European painters in the British Caribbean during the long eighteenth century, particularly George Robertson and Isaac Mendes Belisario. James Pope-Hennessy and others have dismissed Brunias’s compositions as typical plantocratic propaganda designed to deny the brutal reality of plantation slavery. However, a deeper examination reveals the artist as standing apart from his peers in his attention to the human reality of the black presence in the islands. Brunias is unique in highlighting the African past of his black figures and the continuing influence of this past on the development of a vibrant Afro-Creole colonial culture that exists apart from the world of the planters.