👏 Congratulations to all the winners and honorable mentions for their extraordinary contributions to the field of Iberian art history!
#ArtHistory #IberianArt #EleanorTuftsAward #GridleyMcKimSmithAward #ColonialArt #RenaissanceStudies #SpanishArt #PortugueseArt #ScholarlyExcellence #VisualCulture
Agostino Brunias, born in Rome around 1730, spent much of his career in the British Caribbean (especially Dominica) after traveling there in the 1760s. His paintings frequently depict the complex societies of the Lesser Antilles, where African, Caribbean, and European cultures intersected. His canvases depicted daily activities such as washing clothes, trading in markets, or walking through town. He often highlighted the clothing and social identities of free women of color within colonial society. While Brunias’s paintings can provide visual records of Caribbean fashion and community life, they also present an idealized vision of colonial harmony that softens the realities of plantation slavery and colonial hierarchy. The painting’s calm tone reflects both careful observation and the expectations of European collectors. Two Caribbean women walk together along a path after leaving a market, their bodies angled slightly toward one another as if in relaxed conversation. Each balances bundles and baskets likely filled with produce or textiles and carried with practiced ease. Their clothing is vivid and layered with long skirts with aprons, fitted bodices, and colorful headwraps tied high. One woman turns her head toward the other as she gestures gently with her hand, suggesting companionship and familiarity. The tropical landscape is warm earth tones and soft vegetation that frame the figures rather than dominate the scene. The women’s clothing likely carries social meaning within the colonial Caribbean context. Free women of African descent frequently participated in local markets as vendors, traders, and small-scale entrepreneurs, and their dress became an important marker of identity and status. The brightly colored skirts, fitted bodices, jewelry, and carefully tied headwraps seen correspond to historical descriptions of Caribbean fashion among these women, who used clothing both to express cultural identity and to signal respectability or prosperity.
“Dos mujeres antillanas viniendo del mercado” (Two Caribbean Women Returning from the Market) by Agostino Brunias (Italian) – Oil on canvas / c. 1770–1780 – Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga (Málaga, Spain) #WomenInArt #AgostinoBrunias #Brunias #MuseoCarmenThyssen #CaribbeanArt #ColonialArt #art #artText
📍IFA, New York | 💻 Online option available
🔗Learn more: ifa.nyu.edu/events/date/...
#IFANYU #LatinAmericanArt #ArtHistory #Colloquium #PreColumbianArt #ColonialArt #ModernArt #ArtHistoryMatters
(3/3)
This life-size, full-length portrait shows an adult woman with light-to-medium olive skin and dark hair drawn back beneath a jeweled headpiece. She faces forward with a steady, composed expression, framed by a sweeping red drapery and a cool gray interior. Her figure is shaped by an eighteenth-century silhouette, then expanded into a dramatically wide tobajilla (skirt) of blue-and-white striped satin or silk covered with intricate silver-and-gold embroidery. White lace trims her sleeves and neckline. Matching blue shoes fasten with bright buckles over pale stockings. She wears a choker and longer necklace, bracelets, and a chandelier earring with teardrop pearls. In one hand, she holds a folded fan. In her other, she offers a small, ornate watch with a silver-and-pearl pendant above a dark wooden table. Pearls, jewelry, and a vase of flowers sit nearby, turning the scene into a catalog of wealth. Through an arched opening, a manicured promenade with a fountain and distant archway recedes in perspective, anchoring her to Lima, Peru. At lower right, the inscription names her Doña Mariana Belsunse y Salasar, born in Lima, the wife of Coronel Agustín de Landaburrú y Rivera. The Brooklyn Museum frames this portrait as “conspicuous luxury” in Spanish colonial Peru with the tobajilla, jewels, and accessories operating as proof of rank. Beyond the arch is the Paseo dede Aguas and the Plaza de Acho, real Lima landmarks that place her within the city’s public life. The museum recounts that she entered a convent to avoid marrying an older man. Later, she married that man's nephew, the wealthy mayor of Lima for an arc that fueled public scandal. Against that backdrop, the brilliant blue can read as an appeal to virtue, while the tiny watch (held out like evidence) turns time into a luxury object. Attributed to either José Joaquín Bermejo or Pedro José Díaz, the painting fixes her name and reputation in paint now hundreds of years later.
"Doña Mariana Belsunse y Salasar" attributed to José Joaquín Bermejo or Pedro José Díaz (Peruvian) - Oil on canvas / c. 1780 - Brooklyn Museum (New York) #WomenInArt #BrooklynMuseum #ColonialArt #JoseJoaquinBermejo #PedroJoseDíaz #art #artText #BlueskyArt #pintura #PortraitofaWoman #PeruvianArt
Image credit:
St. Michael Archangel, Attributed to Basilio de Santa Cruz Pumacallao, c. 1661–1700
Museo de América
#MuseoDeAmérica #CuzcoPainting #ViceregalArt #ColonialArt #AndeanArt #LatinAmericanArt #ArtHistory #MuseumExhibition #CulturalHeritage
(4/4)
VINTAGE POSTCARD Fantaisie Illustrator transport with the Tonkin colonies pushes It growth Chien Indo-China
www.cpaphil.com/en/p...
#VintagePostcard #AntiquePostcard #FantasyPostcard #IllustratedPostcard #Tonkin #FrenchIndochina #ColonialHistory #ColonialArt
This likeness is one of six portraits Salem merchant Timothy Orne ordered from Boston painter Joseph Badger in 1756 and 1757 to display the prosperity of his household. Orne’s wealth came from a fleet of more than fifty vessels trading fish, grain, molasses, rum, textiles … and at times enslaved people …through the Atlantic world as the same maritime system that nourished his fortune also trafficked in human bondage. The portrait thus records not only young Rebecca’s refinement but the hidden labor of African and Indigenous people whose dispossession and forced work underwrote Salem’s elegance. A ghostly-pale girl stands before a warm, neutral background with her dark hair drawn back and her gaze steady and self-possessed. She wears a rose-colored silk dress with pale blue-gray ruffles that frame her neck and sleeves while the sheen of the fabric is painted in thin, careful layers. In her right hand clings a soft gray pet squirrel, probably an elite colonial child’s companion, signaling gentility and leisure. Her body is turned slightly to the our left, so that the oval of her face becomes the focus. Nothing around her tells of labor or landscape; this is a portrait of status, youth, and belonging in mid-18th-century New England. As an adult, Rebecca married Salem captain and merchant Joseph Cabot in 1768, keeping her within the same shipping-and-slavery-entangled network her father built. Charlestown-born, Badger was originally a house-painter and largely self-taught. He had, by the 1750s, become one of Boston’s “go-to” portraitists for merchants who could not yet command the wildly popular John Singleton Copley. Badger’s methodical underpainting, gray preparatory tones, and frontal poses suited clients who wanted restraint, good taste, and recognizable likenesses. In giving Rebecca a fashionable squirrel, he joined a small colonial trend using an animal to signal both affection and control over nature.
“Portrait of Rebecca Orne” by Joseph Badger (American) – Oil on canvas / 1757 – Worcester Art Museum (Massachusetts) #WomenInArt #art #artText #artwork #ColonialArt #AmericanArt #18thCenturyArt #WorcesterArtMuseum #Portraiture #NewEnglandHistory #ArtHistory #BlueskyArt #GirlsInArt #AmericanArtist
pencil drawing of a capybara standing in side profile, from a 1620s Brazilian colonial codex recording native flora and fauna
#CapybaraAppreciationDay :
Capybara recorded by Frei Cristovão de Lisboa in Historia dos animais d arvores do Maranhão, Brazil, 1620s (facsimile ed. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon, 1967)
purl.pt/38130/1/html...
#NaturalHistoryArt #ColonialArt
digitized image of the painting: landscape orientation, panoramic view of the riverscape, with capybara visible bottom center standing at edge of riverbank in side profile
closeup of the capybara in the painting
It’s #CapybaraAppreciationDay!
Frans Post (Dutch, 1612–1680)
View of the Rio São Francisco Brazil with Fort Maurits and a #Capybara, 1639
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre collection:
collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/5335...
closeup via commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ri...
#DutchBrazil #ColonialArt
5/5
This is more than an art exhibition—it’s a glimpse into the spiritual, political, and cross-cultural forces that shaped the early modern Hispanic world.
#MilwaukeeArtMuseum #ElGreco #Velazquez #Zurbaran #SpanishArt #BaroqueArt #ColonialArt #ArtHistory #MuseumExhibition #GlobalBaroque
digital scan of a page from a sketchbook, watercolor illustration of a pair of Orange-Breasted Green Pigeons in side profile facing back to back, with a leafy branch background very lightly painted in behind them
Francis FitzRoy Dixon (b. Batticaloa, Ceylon 1856 - d. Ottawa, Canada 1914)
Orange-Breasted Green #Pigeons, 3 March 1880
Watercolour over graphite on wove paper, 19.5 × 32.8 cm
Royal Ontario Museum 2017.66.181.7 collections.rom.on.ca/objects/1558...
#BirdsInArt #ColonialArt
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