Imaging Imperialism

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)

1655: Britain seizes Jamaica from Spain

George Robertson, The Spring Head of Roaring River, 1775

Robertson’s patron: William Beckford of Somerley

Peter Paul Rubens, The Watering Place, c. 1615-22

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)

Thomas Gainsborough, The Watering Place, c. 1778

Term: enclosure

George Robertson, The Spring Head of Roaring River, 1775

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

Part II: Paul Gauguin and Tahiti

1840s: Tahiti becomes a French protectorate1880: Tahiti becomes a French colony

Palais des machines, Universal Exposition, Paris 1889

Universal Exposition, Paris, 1889

Egyptian Bazaar and Cairo Street, Universal Exposition, Paris, 1889

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 That costs next to nothing … I’ll go out there and live withdrawn from the so-called civilized world and frequent only so-called savages.”

Brittany

Gauguin, The Vision after the Sermon - - Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1888

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

Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? Where Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897