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THE PROPERTY OF A GERMAN COLLECTOR
The 'Cudgelling Match' and 'Negroes Dance' are perhaps the most reproduced and so most familiar of all of Brunias's West Indian subjects. Both depict subjects in Dominica, the French island ceded to Britain at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763.
Both subjects by Brunias were engraved by the artist in 1779, part of a suite of six stipple engravings (with The Barbados Mulatto Girl [see lot 250]; The West India Flower Girl; Free Natives of Dominica; and The West India Washer-Women), the two engravings in the same direction as the present two panels.
These 1779 engravings were presumably the models for the engravings by N. Ponce of both subjects ('Négres jouant au bâton'; 'Danse de Négres'), printed in reverse, in N. Ponce, Recueil des vues des lieux principaux de la colonie Française de Saint-Domingue, Paris, 1791, fig. 26 (part of L.-E. Moreau de Saint-Méry's Loix et Constitutions des Colonies Françoises de l'Amérique sous le vent, Paris, 1784-1790). The two subjects were also engraved in bistre by Ruotte in Paris, without date. They were published again in London in 1810, without the dedications, by T. Palser.
The 'Cudgelling Match' depicts the stick fighting, or 'Bwa' which was widespread in the West Indies. Two slaves, 'French' and 'English', so reflecting the recent history of the island which was exchanged between the English and French (French until ceded by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, then taken back by the French in 1778 until ceded again in 1783) fight in front of a crowd of slaves. The slaves lowly status is conveyed by their ragged dress. The stage is probably the glacis, the wide stone platform used to dry coffee where slaves would gather on Sundays and holidays to sing and dance. There is a slave house beyond with a European figure in the doorway, thought to be the artist. Beyond, a plantain, or banana tree, originally imported to the Americas, like the slaves, from west Africa. Brunias dedicated his 1779 engraving of the picture to one of his patrons, Sir Ralph Payne, Governor of the Leeward Islands, 1771-76. There is another Dominican stick fighting subject by Brunias in the National Library of Jamaica.
The 'Negroes Dance' sees two slaves dancing, probably performing the Bélé, the dance with African roots, associated with courtship and fertility. The protagonists chant and are accompanied by a refrain from a chorus within the audience, and a drummer and tambourine. Unlike the 'Cudgelling Match', the scene is set in town, probably on a Sunday, and there is a figure of higher status, a mulatress or free woman of colour, sporting her fancy straw hat, with her attendants, on the right of the picture. As in the 'Cudgelling Match' a typical fruit tree stands beyond and serves further to locate the scene. Brunias dedicated his 1779 engraving of the subject to the Honble. Charles O'Hara, Brigadier General of His Majesty's Army in America.
In both pictures Brunias, working in a genre which recalls Hogarth and Wheatley's 'fancy pictures' describing English classes and types, carefully describes the 'clothing, racial characteristics, dwellings and diet' (P. Regis, Describing Early America, Bartram, Jefferson, Crevecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural History, Dekalb, 1992) of his exotic subjects, thereby classifying them to his audience, much as a Linnaean would have described a specimen of natural history. Verisimilitude runs little further though, as Brunias's work in the West Indies, painted for the administrators and plantocracy, necessarily avoids the realities of the working life of the slaves on the sugar estates: 'According to Brunias, the West Indies was a world of happy African-Caribbean peasants and townspeople - a provocatively anti-abolitionist version of "an empire without slaves". The bare visibility of plantations in the backgrounds of these scenes reinforced the impression of African-Caribbeans' autonomy as they received their cloth allowances and celebrated in teeming marketplaces. Anti-abolitionists appreciated his efforts. One wrote: "To the mere European reader I beg leave to recommend an inspection of a set of prints, etched by Brunias, an Italian painter, from drawings made by himself on the spot, representing the negro dancings, cudgellings, &c., &c. of the different islands; which are drawn with much exactness and strong character. Let him compare these plump, active, and merry figures, with the emaciated, squalid, and heart-broken inhabitants of the distant English villages." ' (J. E. Crowley, Imperial Landscapes, Britain's Global Visual Culture 1745-1820, New Haven and London, 2011, pp.118)
Augustin (Agostino) Brunias (1728-1796)
A Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in the Island of Dominica
Details
Augustin (Agostino) Brunias (1728-1796)
A Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in the Island of Dominica
oil on panel
9 x 13in. (22.8 x 33cm.)
A Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes in the Island of Dominica
oil on panel
9 x 13in. (22.8 x 33cm.)
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