Agostino Brunias

Commissioned by Sir William Young, 1st Bt (1725–1788), Governor of Dominica;

By descent to his son, Sir William Young, F.R.S. (1749–1815), Governor of Tobago;

Anonymous sale, Paris, Hotel Drouot, 9 March 1951, lot 74 (as one of a pair);

Private collection, France;

Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, 25 September 2003, lot 425 (where titled ‘Pacification of the Maroon Negros in the Island of Jamaica’);

Where acquired by the mother of the present owners. 

L. Honychurch, ‘Chatoyer’s Artist: Agostino Brunias and the Depiction of St Vincent’, in Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 1, 2004, pp. 105–28, reproduced in colour fig. 18;

S. Thomas, ‘Envisaging a Future for Slavery: Agostino Brunias and the Imperial Politics of Labor and Reproduction’, in Eighteenth Century Studies, Baltimore 2018, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 120–22, reproduced in colour, fig. 3; 

D. Bindman and H.L. Gates (eds), The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition, Part III: The Eighteenth Century, London and Cambridge, Mass. 2011, p. 272, reproduced from the engraving;

D. Cullen and E. Fuentes (eds), Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World, exh. cat., New York 2012, reproduced in colour on the front cover; 

A Smith, D. Blayney Brown and C. Jacobi (eds), Artist and Empire. Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, exh. cat., London 2015, pp. 92–95, reproduced in colour. 

ENGRAVED

Scott, in B. Edwards, An Historical Survey of Saint Domingo, London 1801, facing p. 311;

Scott, in B. Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 4th ed., London 1807, vol. I, facing p. 529.

New York, El Museo del Barrio, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Queens Museum of Art, Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World, 12 June 2012 – 6 January 2013 (unnumbered);

London, Tate Britain, Artist and Empire, 25 November 2015 – 10 April 2016 (unnumbered). 

This painting commemorates the signing of the peace treaty of 1773 between the British Crown and the Black Caribs of St Vincent, marking the end of the First Carib War of 1769–73. Commissioned by the artist’s principal patron, Sir William Young, the first British Governor of Dominica, who negotiated the treaty and is seen seated on the right of the composition, the subject is entirely unique in the artist’s œuvre. A radical departure from his more usual subject matter, the painting represents an important visual document in the history of the political development of the Caribbean.

The Black Caribs, or Chariabes (as distinct from Carib Amerindians, see next lot) were descendants of the original indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean islands who had intermarried with runaway and shipwrecked slaves. The island of St Vincent, of which they regarded themselves to be the indigenous owners, was a particular stronghold for the population and they had never accepted the sovereignty of the European powers, either Spanish, French or more latterly British. Under the leadership of Joseph Chatoyer, the Black Caribs of St Vincent had been resisting British attempts to settle the island since 1763. The matter had come to a head in 1769, when a British survey party supported by the 32nd Regiment was taken hostage, resulting in a full-scale military assault with the aim of deporting the Caribs from the island. So successful was the continued resistance of Chatoyer’s bands, however, coupled with political opposition to the expedition back in Britain, that the government were forced to agree a treaty in February 1773, demarcating an area of the island to be reserved for the Caribs, under the terms of which land was reserved with a right to autonomous self-governance. It is the signing of this treaty, negotiated by Sir William Young on behalf of the British, that forms the subject of the present painting, which was commissioned from Brunias by Young to commemorate the event.

Painted in the artist’s characteristic refined manner, the painting shows the two parties assembled in the British camp, with Sir William seated on the right surrounded by officers of the British contingent. Facing them on the left are eleven Carib chiefs, come to negotiate the peace treaty. Prominent among them is their leader Chatoyer, who stands tall and wary in the centre of the composition. Beside him the rebel’s chief advisor, Jean Baptiste, explains the terms of the treaty as the twenty-four articles of the agreement are read to him by a British officer, whilst on the far left another officer lays out a map which would have delineated the respective boundaries of British and Carib land. Article two of the treaty included the condition that the Caribs surrender their arms, a point which is referenced by collection of guns, swords and bows piled on the ground at Chatoyer’s feet.

With their statuesque poses Brunias imparts a classical elegance to the ‘noble’ Caribs, whilst the kneeling figure in the left foreground directly references Benjamin West’s crouching figure of a Mohawk warrior in The Death of General Wolfe (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), which had been exhibited at the Royal Academy two years before in 1771 (fig. 1). Young himself, who commissioned the picture, is presented in a pose reminiscent of the classical figure of Justice, his arm outstretched in a traditional gesture of peace, and the composition has echoes of works by other British artists depicting treaties with indigenous peoples, including Francis Hayman’s Robert Clive and Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, 1757 (National Portrait Gallery, London) and Robert Home’s The reception of the Mysorean hostage princes by the Marquis Cornwallis, 1792 (National Army Museum, London), which put the emphasis on an orderly meeting of leaders from different cultures.

Born and trained in Rome, Brunias was employed as a draughtsman by the neo-classical architect Robert Adam in Italy in 1756, and returned with Adam to England in 1758. He continued to work under Adam, exhibiting landscapes at the Free Society of Artists in London in 1762 and 1763 and also worked for William Chambers, the official architect to the King. In London he met Sir William Young (1725–1788) who, early in 1764, was appointed President of the Commission for the Sale of Lands in the Ceded Islands which had been acquired by Britain the previous year in the Treaty of Paris. Young, who was later appointed the first British Governor of Dominica, invited Brunias to accompany him to the West Indies as his personal artist. A reformist who, as Sarah Thomas has pointed out (see Literature), was an early advocate of treating enslaved Africans and their descendants with benevolence over a decade before abolitionism came to the ascendance, Young was keen to promote the Ceded Islands as a thriving colonial economy and was quick to recognize the benefits of Brunias’s talents and the potential of his experience with travellers on the Grand Tour in this respect.

Brunias was to remain in the West Indies for the rest of his life, apart from a few years spent in London from the mid-1770s when the Caribbean once more became a battle ground during the American Revolutionary War. The artist painted a large number of works documenting the scenery and inhabitants of the Windward Islands (now known as the Lesser Antilles) for Sir William, who was responsible for negotiating the treaty depicted here, as well as other wealthy British patrons in the Caribbean. His work provides an important record of the life of the Lesser Antilles in the late eighteenth century, depicting the islands at the zenith of British commercial involvement in the region following the cessation of the Seven Years' War and the terms of the Treaty of Paris. However, the present work is the only known painting to record a specific political event in the history of the West Indies such as this.

The composition of this painting was adapted and reformatted by the artist for use as a print in Bryan Edward’s History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies, published in 1801. Transformed into a vertical composition, with the number of Caribs on the left reduced to equal the balance between the two parties, the print was titled Pacification with the Maroon Negroes in the Island of Jamaica, thus also changing the context of the work to refer to an earlier treaty of 1739 or 1740 with the Maroon insurgents in Jamaica, which formed the focus of Edwards’s accompanying text, and overlooking the realpolitik that underlay Young’s settlement in St Vincent, which was the basis of the original painting. More widely circulated, however, the print became better known than the original, which passed through the hands of Young’s descendants and then into a private collection in France, coming to assume the title ascribed to the print in Edwards’s History. Thus, when the painting last appeared at auction in 2003 it was incorrectly described as depicting a treaty with the Trelawny Town Maroons of Jamaica.