Redrawing Jamaica: The Art and Worlds of Isaac Mendes Belisario

Among the many publications scheduled to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the passage of the Act to Abolish the Slave Trade in the British colonies, two books stand out. One is a historical biography published by a Jamaican press, the other a collection of critical essays and complete catalog of objects included in the 2007 exhibition Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, mounted by the Yale Center for British Art. Each is a labor of love, each complements the other, and each features the work of Isaac Mendes Belisario, a Jamaican-born, London-trained Anglo-Jewish artist, whose Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population, in the Island of Jamaica, Drawn after Nature, and in Lithography (1837–38) has until now remained inaccessible to most scholars.

For those unfamiliar with the Sketches or Emancipation-era Jamaica, these two books form a solid introduction. Both contain a facsimile of the letterpress and full-color plates of Sketches, which present two kinds of "characters": Jonkonnu masqueraders, dancers, and musicians, "drawn from life by the Author, with great attention to detail" during the 1836 Christmas festivals (plates 1–7); and Kingston street vendors and laborers, identified by Belisario under the title "Cries of Kingston" (plates 8–11), a clear allusion to its metropolitan counterpart, the Cries of London. The final plate features four anonymous "Creole Negroes"—members of the laboring class born in the West Indies and rendered according to Belisario's perception of "natural" portraiture.

Both books are lavishly illustrated; each contains hundreds of full-color images, ranging from Belisario's less-known landscape paintings in the "planter picturesque" style and portraits of the ruling plantocracy, to maps and parish records, to art by contemporary black diaspora artists like Kapo and Sonia Boyce. All of these images and the accompanying texts demonstrate the complex cultural forces that not only shaped Belisario's representations of colonial Jamaica and Jamaicans during a period of tumultuous change—the end of apprenticeship for the enslaved and the dawning of full freedom—but also continue to characterize Caribbean culture today. Given such a wealth of material, it's not surprising that both books are voluminous and somewhat unwieldy. That should not, however, dissuade readers from delving into the rewarding contents of each.

As its title indicates, Ranston's Belisario aims to illuminate the life of an artist with whom few scholars outside Caribbean studies are familiar. The subtitle refers to him as a Jamaican artist, an identity that, as the late Honorable Rex Net-tleford points out in his foreword and that Ranston makes clear throughout, was shaped by metropolitan attitudes about the Caribbean as well as by the Jewish and African diaspora communities whose histories intertwined with his own. Tracing Belisario's Jewish roots back several centuries, Ranston provides an overview of the expulsion and forced conversion of Spanish and Portuguese Jews. She follows the complicated series of displacements experienced by Belisario's ancestors during the Inquisitions. She outlines his family's strong ties to the Jewish community in London and their establishment in the merchant-trading classes, leading at last to Alexandre Lindo, Isaac's French-born maternal grandfather, whom she finds living in Kingston in 1765 and running the Caribbean arm of the Lindos' transatlantic affairs. In 1786 Belisario's father, Abraham Mendes Belisario, traveled from London to Kingston to work in Alexandre's counting-house, and later to marry his daughter Esther, who would become, in 1794, the artist's mother.

Ranston's impressively researched biography, which relies on hitherto unpublished records, is not limited to tracing genealogies; she contextualizes the world in which her subjects lived, documenting their rising and falling fortunes. She doesn't shy away from detailing the activities...