Global Encounters and the Archives: Britain’s Empire in the Age of Horace Walpole
Item
A View in the Island of Jamaica, of Roaring River Estate, Belonging to William Beckford Esqr. Near Savannah la Marr, March 25, 1778
Title
A View in the Island of Jamaica, of Roaring River Estate, Belonging to William Beckford Esqr. Near Savannah la Marr, March 25, 1778
Description
This print, part of a series of "views" of the British colony, crafts an idyllic image of one of the four sugar plantations that William Beckford, a white man born in Jamaica, inherited from his father in 1744. While, on Beckford's plantations, nearly one thousand enslaved persons experienced brutal working conditions, the artist imagines an orderly, proto-industrial, and picturesque colonial stronghold carved out of an otherwise "unruly" and "uncultivated" landscape. Enslaved laborers are a minuscule presence within the scene, and the two most prominently figured individuals are depicted at rest, conversing casually, instead of engaged in grueling labor or undergoing the forms of torture upon which plantation slavery relied. Catalog Record
Contributor
Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University Library
Creator
Thomas Vivares
