Happy (?) Jamaican Slaves via the Prints of Isaac Mendes Belisario

Isaac Mendes Belisario (1795-1849), has been described as the first documented Jamaican artist, but he was raised for a time in London, studied art and then worked as a stockbroker before returning Kingston, Jamaica, (a British colony) in the early 1830s. He became a well-known artist, painting landscapes and state portraits of important colonial residents, but he also made prints about the island’s local slave population. His work provides a rich description of Jamaican life at the time of the Emancipation, and while some of his observations seem one-sided according to today’s state of political correctness, they do enlighten us about slaves’ daily activities, and celebrations.

Belisario was a member of the Sephardic Jewish merchant class, who worked in retail, wholesaling, and dealt in the country’s slave trade. In 1831, Jamaica’s Assembly proclaimed the Jewish Emancipation Act, which allowed great freedoms for Jews versus the more restricted existence in London. One of Belisario’s distant relatives was briefly imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition in 1656, before escaping to London. The other side of his family were in the opera and performed for the King of Spain. Another relative, Isaac’s uncle Jacob, was an art dealer, stockbroker and participant in a huge embezzlement scheme of the day.

Born in Kingston in 1794, Belisario was named after his grandfather, the Rabbi Isaac Mendes Belisario (1719-1791), of the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London. One of the Rabbi's sons, Abraham Mendes Belisario came to Jamaica in 1786 where he was employed by Alexandre Lindo, who was one of the wealthiest Jews on the island. Abraham married Alexandre's daughter, Esther, and he was made a partner in Lindo's business, When faced with bankruptcy, Isaac Mendes Belisario's father left his family in London, looked for a job and soon found himself in the West Indies, in Tortola, where he became the manager of seven sugar plantations. He was horrified to see how cruelly the slaves were treated and eventually served on a jury of the first white man brought up on murder charges for killing a slave in Tortola. He wrote an unsuccessful report calling for protection for the treatment of Africans in the West Indies. In addition, the artist’s maternal grandfather was involved in the finances of the Haitian revolution.

In 1837-38, Belisario made a series of hand-colored prints based on a holiday carnival practiced for decades by slaves, called " Sketches of Character In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica " they were accompanied with detailed ethnographic texts. Although slavery was abolished in Jamaica in 1833, these prints were very telling about the perception of the lives of slaves, both before and after emancipation, and they are still very popular in Jamaica.

In tracing the West African roots of Jonkonnu and its evolution in Jamaica, it had its origins with Jon Konny, a celebrated Nzema chief who ruled over Prince's Town in the 17th and 18th centuries in what is now Ghana. The Jonkonnu masquerades became very elaborate, as they incorporated the traditions of other African peoples and even some European carnival traditions. If anything, Jonkonnu was a leveller of slave society where the great Jamaican houses were opened up to the slaves who "drank with their masters and spoke with greater familiarity"; the distance between them briefly forgotten.

All the images represent happy, smiling slaves, well-dressed in theatre European style costumes with fancy wigs and jewelry. He felt the power of these fascinating carnival scenes of slaves. Some of these parades and competitions borrowed from Shakespeare characters. In a blend of carnival and east African dance traditions, the "Jack-in-Green" image at the bottom of this article, we find a barefoot figure in the center of the image, where an initiate’s body is completely hidden by a mask on its face and long vegetable fibers cover the body. Black women in European costumes dance about the covered figure like moths to a flame. Belisario also includes in these images a masked dancer, John Canoe, who was a chief of the village in the Gulf of Guinea, working in the 1720s.

Isaac M. Belisario was not a well man; suffering from tuberculosis. He seems to have never married; nor had any children, although he still has collateral descendents in Jamaica and Australia. His last documented print was produced in 1846, and he is known to have died in London three years later. A book about this artist’s enthralling past has recently been published.

Exhibitions:
Royal Academy
the Society for Painters in Oils and Water-Colours
His prints were produced working with the French printmaker Adolphe Duperly.

Beatriz Pestana-Osuna:Revealing A Hidden History

The prints of Venezuelan printmaker Beatriz Pestana-Osuna grabbed my attention for what I found and what I didn't find in her images.  Petsana-Osuna chooses to talk about a part of her heritage, that of being a Sephardi Jew, also known as the Hidden Jews. She has chosen to speak about her family's past, which she's been able to re-trace back four hundred years, as a part of her identity as a person and as an artist. The work she's created echoes the loss of place, endless migration and a people who have struggled to remain themselves in spite of an apparent cloaked disguise and wearing the proverbial  faceless mask to live, to survive.

For the uninitiated, a Sephardi Jew is a person descended from Jews who lived in Iberia before being expelled from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal in 1497. Those that did not leave could only stay if they publicly accepted another faith, like Christianity. Those Jews then fervently practiced their faith in secret. The traditional language of Sephardim is a form of Judeo-Spanish, also called Judezmo or Ladino. It is an Old Castilian Spanish Romance language, with elements of Turkish, and Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and French. The Sephardim have distinguished themselves in service fields of medicine and politics, and have been a valuable asset to the Christian and Muslim communities of Europe. During World War II, the Nazis almost completely wiped out entire populations of Sephardi Jewry from France, the Netherlands Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece during the Holocaust. Fortunately, their unique language and traditions were saved from being completely lost. They have migrated worldwide, although a small population of Sephardi remain in Spain and Portugal. 

The "Golden Age" of Sephardi Jewry was a two hundred year period where Jews welcomed and worked alongside the Muslims who invaded the peninsula of Spain and Portugal. They saw the Muslim Moors as their liberators from an enforced Catholicism. One group of the Sephardi are called Crypto-Jews. This the group from which Pestana-Osuna descends. Her Sephardic heritage hails from Spanish-Portuguese origin. Her images address her personal journey to connect with her ancestors’ experience. Her choice to make the people in these images faceless and shrouded, with only an Jewish star to identify themselves as being together is painful. There is an eerie feeling of people passing us as though they are on a long journey, but they aren't necessarily people that are 'with' us in this lifetime. The images also speak of a drifting through time, and a passage with no end in sight. It is a ghostly existence and we are transfixed to sit along the side of the road to watch the endless souls passing before us. These so-called Hidden Jews, these people who, patiently endured the ignorance of the people surrounding them, have been travelling forever similarly as have the Roma, only seeking their place, their time, their home, their families, and the freedom to practice their religion.  While Pestana-Osuna describes for us her heritage, her past, we can understand the desire to belong to a place and a group. Thankfully, the Sephardi continue to survive and prosper. We see even in Pestana-Osuna's last image a collective group of people who gather under lights that identify them as being part of the same group.We can either see that in an historic context of Jews who were gathered in death camps during WWII, or we can see it as a positive step forward as these weary, long-traveled souls finally find the light to which they can gather  together, to be saved from the darkness. I choose to believe she's showing us the latter, and one can look forward to seeing their hope-filled future.