The Huntington acquires set of six works by Agostino Brunias

1 March 2023

The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens has acquired a set of six paintings by Italian-born artist Agostino Brunias

The paintings show free people of colour in Dominica and St Vincent, in scenes of daily life on the islands. Brunias holds a particular place in the continuing reassessment of how European painters depicted Black and mixed-race subjects, and his work is among the most closely argued over. What such pictures were intended to do and what they actually did are separate questions, and both matter here, since images of this kind circulated in Britain in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, when slavery, colonial rule and the plantation economy were under open debate.