idiosyncratic

fuckyeahlatinamericanhistory:

hatsfromhistory:

ohlookhistory:

would love to know the source for these!

These are by Agostino Brunias, an 18th century Italian artist who spent some years living in the West Indies, at the employ of a British government official and various white plantation owners, and who created many images of the islands’ Black and indigenous population. He lived in some of the smaller Caribbean islands which had just come under British control—Dominica, St. Vincent—and which had a very different society than, say, Jamaica, Cuba, or Saint-Domingue, which had much more agricultural activity with much larger Black slave populations and longer colonial presence. In the 18th century, many of the members of the Black population of St. Vincent and Dominica were not enslaved, and the demographic mix also included a large number of indigenous Caribs and mixed-race people of Carib and African ancestry, some of whom would be the ancestors of the Garifuna of Central America.  He also visited St. Kitts, Barbados, Trinidad, and Tobago. Brunias’ work painted a pretty rosy picture of Black life in the West Indies, but it’s also some of the very few positive artistic representations of Black Caribbean life from that time period. His work also showed how much skin color and race-mixing affected the social status of Black West Indians in these particular societies where a one-drop rule was not in place. Brunias died in 1796 so the work referenced above was published posthumously. He exhibited a lot of his work in England in the late 18th century.

(Source: teentrap, via lati-negros)