A statue of Sir Hans Sloane stands at the center of London’s Chelsea Physic Garden where all variety of plants vie for attention. Sloane demonstrated his talent for gathering specimens (like those over which his statue presides) in his resplendently detailed title, Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles Etc. of the Last of those Islands (vol.1 ,1707; vol. 2, 1725) which serves as both travel log and visual natural history, a manifestation of the eighteenth-century desire to index the world. Kay Dian Kriz begins Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840 with Sloane’s folio in order to explore the visual strategies used to represent the West Indies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In contrast to the abundance of scholarship addressing icons like the kneeling slave and the slave ship, Kriz’s study is aimed at the imagery designed to promote the colonial project in the West Indies, and it makes a remarkable new contribution to this area of study.

Through five chapters plus an introduction and afterword, Kriz charts both high and low artistic attempts to convey competing views of the Caribbean to the English public. She draws on a rich array of glossy color and black-and-white images ranging from graphic satires to natural history illustrations (and other images generally categorized outside the realm of “art”) as she discusses paintings and prints associated with the British West Indies that were produced around the campaign to abolish the slave trade. Just as raw sugar cane was refined into white crystals, artists portrayed island inhabitants as an often savage, overly sexualized, and unruly people who could be refined through colonials. Yet Kriz’s work also transcends the binary of metropolitan center and colonial outpost (the polite society of London versus the impolite colonial settlement) by addressing representations that confirmed and contested what she deems the dominant spatial model. These include paintings and prints that “proffered the possibility of social refinement in these British island colonies, not just economic profit and sexual pleasure” (4).

Although painting plays a role in her book, Kriz gives special attention to prints, given that they were widely held and reproduced. The book abounds with them; it is evident that Kriz has mined the collections of the British Museum, J. Carter Brown Library, and the Yale Center for British Art, to name a few. Her study is well illustrated with many color and black-and-white reproductions, enlarging the fine details separately when needed. The words surrounding images play another key role; Kriz demonstrates a commitment to the image-text relationship by examining how images reinforced and complicated prevailing discourses.

In Voyage . . . to Jamaica, Sloane constructed an island that is both fascinating and frightful, a place where menacing sea creatures, exotic flora, and elements of “native” culture are carefully arranged to arouse the curiosity of the viewer. In these images, Kriz argues, violence is just below the surface, as Sloane drew on themes found in New World travel literature and natural histories: “what is striking about this text is the manner in which the fear of omnipresent and ubiquitous violence, emanating from the entire Jamaican ecosystem of plants, animals, and humans, surfaces as latent content within the realm of the visual” (15). Sloane’s scientific stance created a refined and safe distance, thereby making his subject matter appear less threatening.

One of Kriz’s most interesting examples of colonial mastery is not found in a traditional artwork, but in a transcription of three African songs contained in Voyage . . . to Jamaica. Here, she makes evident one of the book’s goals, which is “to reject this older model of segregating ‘art’ from other forms of visual culture” (5). Kriz notes that what distinguishes the song’s transcription is the use of large print, the only other sizable type used in Voyage . . . to Jamaica being found on the title page. Something of note is occurring; Sloane has witnessed part of a slave festival, and conveys his perception of the merriment. Instead of inserting himself into the observed scene (as he does in other parts of Voyage . . . to Jamaica), Sloane’s transcription provides evidence of removing himself from the revelry. He writes: “The Negros are much given to Venery, and although hard wrought, will at night, or on Feast days Dance and Sing; their Songs are all bawdy, and leading that way” (23).

Readers learn quickly that the body, whether dancing, working, or standing still, is a major theme of Kriz’s book, and in chapter 2, she discusses the mulâtresse, as depicted by Italian painter Brunias in a series of works showing the lives of non-European inhabitants in the British West Indies. The artist formed part of the entourage of Sir William Young who was appointed Commissioner and Receiver for the sale of lands in the islands of Dominica, St. Vincent, and Tobago. By painting the islands in a positive light, Brunias played an important role in promoting their colonization. Rather than serving as warning signs of local dangers, his work became, in a sense, a form of high-art advertising for a group of enchanting islands filled with potentially productive people and materials. Brunias employed visual strategies to present the Ceded Islands “as a potentially refined as well as profitable space” (44), and his paintings were extremely popular. His fashionably dressed women of mixed race, drifting through markets, were easier to depict in public spaces than white European women—figures we rarely see out and about in canvases of the period. The mulâtresse was not the only woman Brunias painted, but she had an important role in the representation of the social life of the West Indies. Kriz emphasizes her in-betweeness; she is caught between black and white, Europe and Africa, coming to represent the cultivation of a civilized society.

Satirical prints were less kind to women of color, whose bodies served as raw material for generating laughter. Kriz notes that artists relied on “types” rather than pure caricatures. In examples like Richard Newton’s The Full Moon in Eclipse (1797), What a Nice Bit! (1796), and Isaac Cruikshank’s A Morning Surprise (1807), women of color are shown as monstrous creatures who arouse and prey on the desires of white men. Caricaturists, Kriz notes, did not always clearly align themselves with either the pro- or anti-slavery camps. However, the overly amorous, corpulent woman of color contrasted greatly with the image of the female slave who died during the Middle Passage or who toiled away at manual labor.

Kriz emphasizes that both high and low art forms had ways of normalizing and naturalizing a new racial science. In John Boyne’s watercolor A Meeting of Connoisseurs (1807), dressed-up art aficionados compare a classical sculpture to a tall, muscular, and black male studio model, with a degree of inspection befitting a slave auction. The model’s body exists for scrutiny as well as fantasy, as Kriz detects a displaced homoeroticism (given the poses and gestures of the white men). Although the connoisseurs view his body with amazement, the black man is no Apollo Belvedere. Kriz reminds the reader that the awe-inspiring, well-formed black male body “could never attain an ideal status, because the very notion of an ideal body that was not white was a contradiction in terms within the nexus of a heated debate about West Indian slavery, an emerging ‘science’ of race, a self-consciously Eurocentric aesthetic, and the newly expanding business of commercial caricature” (90).

Kriz’s book addresses issues of slavery as well as abolition. In chapter 4, she answers the impending question: How were slaves to be defined once freed? Kriz illustrates her answer with Sketches of Character, a set of lithographs by Isaac Belisario published in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1837–38. Belisario, who was Jewish, also lived on the outside of elite society. His images show blacks as primary subjects, not slaves within a larger topographical landscape. Belisario’s work sought to invent a black folk from a newly emancipated slave population, which involved “re-imagining slaves who had always been defined in terms of their ineradicable African-ness as both a peasantry and urban working class” (143).

Belisario chose familiar methods for depicting his subjects, ones with which the British public could relate. He drew on the pictorial tradition of “Cries” (hawkers of various goods and services in the urban streets) and invited viewers to compare them to the ones back home in London—the standard of refinement, even when pertaining to less sophisticated images of street denizens. “Set Girls” who paraded through Kingston’s streets at New Year’s, along with folk figures such as John Canoes (who, accompanied by musicians, donned outlandish costumes and masks, and paraded around at Christmas) and Actor-Boys, who wore elaborate headdresses and whose performances emphasized mimicry, served as the new representatives of the West Indies. They are entertaining: a native population having a good time—an easy group among which Europeans could live. Belisario makes them non-threatening, while at the same these entertainers playfully transgressed racial, class, and gender divisions. Some figures, like the Actor-Boys, were not visibly black, as they were fully covered in masquerade dress as they satirized polite culture and society, performing “travestied snippets of Shakespeare’s plays and other stock pieces” (136).

Artists, advertisers, and travel companies continue to make places like Jamaica attractive to non-native visitors while smoothing over social and economic problems. The competing images in Kriz’s Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement expose the roots of the prejudices and disparities that are the inheritance of transatlantic slavery and colonialism, and that have shaped the modern Caribbean. Having successfully wed art history and postcolonial studies to build her arguments, Kriz has made a substantial contribution to the growing body of literature on visual culture in the Atlantic World.