Contradictions of Culture and Oppression: Portraits of Planters in Power and of Black West Indians in Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Art

• Published in: New West Indian Guide 2024-09, Vol.98 (3/4), p.237-276
• Main Author: Burke, S. Maureen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1382-2373; 2213-4360
• DOI: 10.1163/22134360-bja10032

Few early eighteenth-century Caribbean paintings survive. Among them is an important pair of previously unpublished Jamaican portraits of Chief Justice Thomas Fearon Jr., of Clarendon, and of his wife, Mary Peters Fearon, with their oldest son, Thomas Peters Fearon, from the 1730s. Colonial reflections of London art and society, although distorted by distance, occupied unique spaces where fantasies and realities collided. This article examines the historical context, provenance, and interpretation of the large, three-quarter-length paintings by an unidentified artist as well as the little that is known about the Jamaican art world at the time. Two unpublished drawings by Pierre du Simitière of Black West Indian women—one enslaved, one free—provide a counterpoint, as do other colonial depictions. The Fearon portraits form a rare pictorial record of a family at the apex of a transatlantic human pyramid of visible privilege and unseen pain, a century before that world ended.