Title: Brunias Illustrations Page Extract from: Chatoyer's Artist: Agostino Brunias and the depiction of St Vincent by Lennox Honychurch [www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/ svg/conference/papers/honychurch.htm]
In 2002, the paramount chief of the Black Caribs of St Vincent, Chatoyer, (Chatawe), was declared the National Hero of St. Vincent. The visual representation of Chatoyer as a nationalist icon of an independent Caribbean state in the 21st century was set in place by the paintings and engravings of him, which were done by an Italian artist, Agostino Brunias, in the 18th century. Today his paintings and engravings sell for thousands, and in the case of the larger paintings for hundreds of thousands, of dollars in the auction houses of London and New York. His art was escapist as it was romantic, it distorted the harsh realities of slavery in St Vincent and the Lesser Antilles so as to satisfy his absentee planter clientele and yet in its detail it reveals aspects of Caribbean heritage that are impossible to glean from the texts of documentary archives. Historic illustrations in the tourism literature of St Vincent today still use Brunias' engravings to depict an idyllic plantation society in tune with the demands of the tourism product which, in matters of history prefers a selective memory in the same way that the plantocracy favoured a selective depiction of reality.
