Brooklyn Museum Acquires Painting Offering Caribbean Twist on European Portraiture

The has acquired an 18th-century work by Italian painter Agostino Brunias that boosts its collection of Caribbean-themed art.

The oil painting, “Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape,” will go on display March 7 in the museum’s European galleries.

The work depicts two mixed-race women, their mother and children, as well as eight African servants, meandering through the grounds of a sugar plantation on the Caribbean island of Dominica. One of the richly dressed women might have been the wife of Brunias’s patron, according to the museum’s description.

The painting offers “a Caribbean spin on aristocratic European portraiture,” said Rich Aste, Curator of European Art at the museum. He noted its likely appeal to the large West Indian community around the museum.

“In the 18th century in the West Indian island of Dominica, social and racial distinctions were fluid, and many people of color, as shown here, were prosperous and privileged,” Aste said. “Prior to acquiring this work, the museum was unable to present this social and civil reality through the collection to its diverse audiences.”

Brunias had established himself as a successful artist in London during the mid-1700s and moved at the height of his career to Dominica to chronicle life in the British colony. The museum bought “Free Women of Color” from Robilant + Voena, a gallery in London.

The painting is a Caribbean version of contemporaneous English work by William Hogarth and Thomas Gainsborough, whose work also often depicts landed gentry engaged in leisurely pursuits.

Brunias’s Caribbean paintings “celebrate the diversity of European, Caribbean and African influences in the region,” according to a release from the museum. “Although Brunias was originally commissioned to promote upper-class plantation life, his works soon assumed a more subversive, political role throughout the Caribbean as endorsements of a free, anti-slavery society, exposing the artificialities of racial hierarchies in the West Indies.”

One prominent Brunias supporter was Haiti’s liberator, Francois-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, who wore on his waistcoat 18 buttons decorated with reproductions of Brunias’s paintings.

“Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape” will hang on the portraiture wall between contemporaneous female Spanish colonial and French subjects in the museum’s European gallery.