Imaging Imperialism
Dec 18, 2015
Part I: Images of Colonial Jamaica
Tim Barringer, Gillian Forester, and Barbara Martinez-Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)
George Robertson, The Spring Head of Roaring River, 1775
Robertson’s patron: William Beckford of Somerley
Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Dancing Figures, 1648
Term: picturesque
Salvator Rosa, Landscape with Travelers Asking the Way, c. 1641
William Gilpin, Scene without picturesque adornment, ca. 1792
William Gilpin, Scene with picturesque adornment, ca. 1792
Images from: William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, On Picturesque Travel, and On Sketching Landscape (1792)
From James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica from Drawings Made in the Years 1820 and 1821, published in 1824
The Old Montpelier Estate
Montego Bay
Adolphe Duperly, The Attack of the Rebels on Montpelier Old Works Estate, 1833
Terms: Christmas Rebellion or Baptist War, 1831; Emancipation Act, 1833
Adolphe Duperly, A View of Montego-Bay, Taken from Reading Hill, The Rebels Destroying the Road
and Reading Wharf in Flames, 1833
Gauguin imagining Tahiti in 1889: “With the money I’ll have, I can buy a native hut, like the ones you saw at the Universal Exposition. Made of wood and clay, thatched over (near a town, yet in the country). That costs next to nothing … I’ll go out there and live withdrawn from the so-called civilized world and frequent only so-called savages.”
Gauguin describing Tahiti: “Such a beautiful night it is. Thousands of persons are doing the same as I do this night; abandoning themselves to sheer living … The Tahitian soil is becoming quite French, and the old order is gradually disappearing. Our missionaries have already introduced a good deal of Protestant hypocrisy and are destroying a part of the country, not to mention the pox which has attacked the whole race ...” (Gauguin, letter to his wife Mette, 1891)
Gauguin, Siesta, Tahiti, c. 1893
Paul Gauguin, Vahine no te Tiare - - Woman with a Flower, Tahiti, 1891