Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape

ca. 1770-1796

Commissioned by the British government, the Italian artist Agostino Brunias created a series of paintings capturing the complex social and racial hierarchies of plantation life on the newly acquired British island of Dominica. Here, on the grounds of a sugar plantation, two mixed-race sisters wearing European-style clothing appear at center alongside their mother (at left), two children, and eight African servants. Brunias signaled the women’s elite status based on subtleties of skin color and dress, as well as space, foregrounding them in a position typically occupied by white settlers in traditional British “conversation pieces” (informal group portraits). While this idyllic scene seemingly endorses the cultural and racial hybridity of the region, it also projects a colonial fantasy that erases enslaved labor.