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Lot Essay
Brunias painted numerous St Vincent subjects for his patron Sir William Young, first British Governor of Dominica, who had sugar estates on the island. Britain had been given St Vincent, along with Dominica and Tobago by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. The British distinguished the so-called Island or 'Yellow' Caribs from the 'Black' Caribs (supposedly descended from African slaves who has intermarried with the Indian population), and Young would exploit the supposed racial division (with Brunias carefully describing the different types in his paintings) in his governance of the island.
‘Indians specifically associated with the West Indies were also imaged as types or specimens in travel literature and New World histories, and in fact Brunias produced a number of paintings and prints of Caribs of St Vincent. Indians were objects of curiosity throughout the eighteenth century and no doubt Brunias’s viewers, including white West Indians from the older islands, where there were few, if any, Caribs, would have found them intriguing subjects. With his usual close attention to costume and accessory, Brunias fed the curiosity, taking pains to detail the shells, feathers, and patterned cloth that adorned the otherwise naked bodies of the Island Caribs, or Yellow Caribs as they were called. They are shown with the tawny skin and straight black hair that characterize images and textual descriptions of other indigenous Americans; these physical features distinguish them from the other Caribs on St Vincent, the so-called Black Caribs.’ (K.D. Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement Picturing the British West Indies 1700-1840, New Haven and London, 2008, pp.46-7). For a further discussion of the so-called 'yellow' and 'black' Caribs of the island, and their tropes for contemporary observers, see P. Hulme, 'Dominica and Tahiti: Tropical Islands Compared' in F. Driver and L. Martins, Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, Chicago, 2005, pp.77-90).
‘Indians specifically associated with the West Indies were also imaged as types or specimens in travel literature and New World histories, and in fact Brunias produced a number of paintings and prints of Caribs of St Vincent. Indians were objects of curiosity throughout the eighteenth century and no doubt Brunias’s viewers, including white West Indians from the older islands, where there were few, if any, Caribs, would have found them intriguing subjects. With his usual close attention to costume and accessory, Brunias fed the curiosity, taking pains to detail the shells, feathers, and patterned cloth that adorned the otherwise naked bodies of the Island Caribs, or Yellow Caribs as they were called. They are shown with the tawny skin and straight black hair that characterize images and textual descriptions of other indigenous Americans; these physical features distinguish them from the other Caribs on St Vincent, the so-called Black Caribs.’ (K.D. Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement Picturing the British West Indies 1700-1840, New Haven and London, 2008, pp.46-7). For a further discussion of the so-called 'yellow' and 'black' Caribs of the island, and their tropes for contemporary observers, see P. Hulme, 'Dominica and Tahiti: Tropical Islands Compared' in F. Driver and L. Martins, Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, Chicago, 2005, pp.77-90).