Kingston Harbor, Linen Market, St. Vincent

Agostino Brunias, 1728–1796

ca. 1780

Oil on canvas

Yale Center for British Art

A bustling outdoor market scene depicts numerous people interacting amidst stalls selling goods, with a harbor and mountainous landscape in the background. The linen market was a recurrent theme in the work of Agostino Brunias. His detailed depictions of the buying and selling of textiles—manufactured in Britain for export to the Caribbean and Africa—were calculated to showcase the prosperity of the British-controlled West Indies, and the islands’ active participation in the global economy. Brunias’s careful depictions of dress and race draw on ethnological images of racial and social types that were popular in Europe, yet his figures also function as individuals actively negotiating their place in society. Dress was a form of resistance and means of establishing autonomy among the ens