The artist sketching in Jamaica

Wickstead, a portrait painter and pupil of Zoffany, worked in Rome until 1773 and was taken by the sugar planter William Beckford of Somerley to Jamaica in 1774 – Beckford's retinue including the landscape artist George Robertson. Wickstead worked under Beckford's patronage until 1786, painting the local planters and their families and exhibiting paintings from Jamaica at the Society of Artists. For a brief review of his career see F. Cundall, 'Philip Wickstead of Jamaica', Connoisseur, 94 (1934), pp.174-75: 'Beckford said of him, after his visit to Jamaica: His powers of painting were considerably weakened by indolence, and more than all, by a wonderful eccentricity of character. His colouring was almost equal to that of any artist of his time; and the freedom and execution of his pencil were particularly apparent in his representation of negroes of every character, expression, and age. Unfortunately many of Wickstead's drawings perished in the hurricane of 1780.'
Beckford was in Jamaica managing his plantations at Fort William, Roaring River, and Williamsfield, and, with his two artists in tow, planning to write an illustrated history of the colony with which his family had been so long connected. Severe losses suffered from the hurricane of 1780 and other related financial problems, put paid to these plans. 'His Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, published in 1790, conceived in part as a riposte to antislavery sentiment and partly as a personal apologia, provided one of the clearest insights available into the beliefs of the Jamaican plantocracy.' (T. Barringer, G. Forrester, and B. Martinez-Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, New Haven and London, [nd], p.43).