Originally published on Art UK.
In 1791, the Italian-born painter Agostino Brunias (c.1730–1796) left London for the West Indies on the ship of the sugar plantation owner and Governor of Dominica, Sir William Young.
By establishing himself as a 'colonial painter' in the tropical archipelago of the Caribbean in the 1770s, Brunias romanticised the slave labour and leisurely activities of a multicultural, creolised society under the British Empire. Yet he also painted black and mixed-race subjects with a kind of dignity and reverence rarely seen before in European art history…