Much as other European artists sought to capture the details of the flora and fauna of new territorial possessions in the 18th century, so the Italian artist Agostino Brunias sought to record the manners and customs of the inhabitants of the West Indies. Brunias was born in Rome in 1730. Whilst working in England for the architect Robert Adam as a draughtsman and decorative artist, Brunias met William Young who, in 1764, was nominated the first Commissioner and Receiver for sale of lands in the ceded (from France) West Indies islands of Dominica, St Vincent, Grenada and Tobago. Brunias agreed to accompany Young to the West Indies as his personal artist.

Brunias spent seven years in the West Indies creating romantic genre scenes of markets, village and harbour scenes. Brunias’s treatment of his human subjects reflects that of artists recording natural history specimens: every aspect of dress and accessory is captured in exhaustive detail yet the figures appear as ‘types’ rather than individuals. Dress is used as the marker of particular colonial identities encountered on the islands: Carib, Black Carib, mulatto (a now outdated term referring to a person of mixed black and white parentage), slave, freedman, and planter. Brunias’s romanticised images of island life, which denied the harsh realities of plantation slavery, were popular with members of the white plantocracy, both in the West Indies and in Britain. This image is an engraved copy by the French artist Louis Charles Ruotte.