A lady of some means in her house, one of J-B Debret's watercolors during his trip to Brazil from DEBRET, Jean-Baptiste, Picturesque and Historical Journey to Brazil, São Paulo 1816-1831

About this work

The larger compositions work when they manage to return to the silence and understatement of the sketches. This creates a far more complicated narrative space than the last painting. This is one of Debret’s great domestic interiors devoted to the anatomization of the power relations of slavery. The print operates tremendous tensions around stasis and movement, and its horizontal layering articulates a ruthless hierarchy. The slaves are the only people in contact with the floor, indeed they dominate the ground level. At the bottom are the naked and half-naked infants, frozen, like pets at play, in the middle foreground. The smallest one, like a miniature statue of the Buddha, is compositionally caught up in a music of the spheres, the round belly, with its round navel, and shaved head bounce off the orange clasped in the chubby hand. The other infant looks towards its slave mother and is about to crawl forward. The two adult slave women operate in the left and right margins of the middle ground, seated on mats; they stare intently over their lace making, sitting on hard bamboo mats with legs crossed. They mimic the intense concentration of the two white females. The far right…