Bouquetières de Saint-Domingue

A brightly clothed Black woman with dark skin offers a flower for sale to a woman of mixed race in this eighteenth-century engraving. French engraver Labrousse published this illustration in Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur’s ethnographic book Encyclopédie des Voyages (1796) with the title Bouquetières de Saint-Domingue. It is a copy of an original work entitled the “West India Flower Girl” by Italian figure painter Agostino Brunias. Brunias first traveled to the Caribbean in the late 1760s and eventually settled permanently in Dominica. Much of his artwork features eroticized scenes of island life. Brunias, like many other Europeans in the Caribbean, was fascinated by the presence of Black and Brown women in higher-class positions than would have been seen in Europe, and many of his paintings feature “mulâtresses” participating in respectable scenes of daily life that would be surprising to his European audience. Saint-Domingue, like other Caribbean colonies of the time, had a racial class structure where wealthy Black and mixed-race people could be considered members of the colonial elite.