Brooklyn Museum Acquires 18th Century Painting by Agostino Brunias Depicting Colonial Elite

Brooklyn Museum Acquires 18th Century Painting by Agostino Brunias Depicting Colonial Elite

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2011-01-18

Agostino Brunias (Italian, ca. 1730-1796), Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape, ca. 1764-1796, Oil on canvas, 2010.59, Gift of Mrs. Carll H. de Silver in memory of her husband, and gift of George S. Hellman, by exchange.

BROOKLYN, NY.—The Brooklyn Museum has acquired, by purchase from the London gallery Robilant + Voena, Agostino Brunias’s (1730-1796) painting Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape, (circa 1764-96), a portrait of the eighteenth-century mixed-race colonial elite of the island of Dominica in the West Indies. Brunias, a London-based Italian painter, left England at the height of his career to chronicle Dominica, then one of Britain’s newest colonies in the Lesser Antilles. [The painting will go on view 2001-03-07.]

The painting depicts two richly dressed mixed race women, one of whom was possibly the wife of the artist’s patron. They are shown accompanied by their mother and their children, along with eight African servants, as they walk on the grounds of a sugar plantation, one of the agricultural estates that were Dominica’s chief source of wealth. Brunias documents colonial women of color as privileged and prosperous. The two wealthy sisters are distinguished from their mother and servants by their fitted European dresses…

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