During the eighteenth century, wealthy elite in Europe and North America frequently commissioned portrait miniatures as keepsakes for loved ones. But they weren’t the only ones: these pocket-sized portraits, made to be carried or worn as jewelry, were popular in the Dutch Caribbean too. A portrait miniature from Suriname tells us about the changing social and cultural landscape of this former Dutch colony.
On display in the Rijksmuseum is a small, oval portrait miniature of a young woman from Suriname.1 The image has faded slightly, probably from having been exhibited for long periods of time: the thin layer of watercolour pigments on an ivory surface is light sensitive. Yet the portrait is no less striking. A young woman sits up straight and gazes directly at her beholder, her chin lowered slightly to further intensify that gaze. She is dressed in a white Empire dress and headwrap paired with a ribbon necklace and gold earrings, a style typical of the 1800s, around which time this portrait was made. A basic gilded frame with a metal backing frames the sitter while a protective convex glass secures the surface. It is a simple miniature, well-made, but unlike the elaborate bejewelled versions that were popular with European royalty and wealthy elites. In a museum known for its large and opulent works of art, this small and intimate portrait instantly captivates its beholder.
Portrait miniatures were very personal mementoes. They were often commissioned for loved ones or family, allowing someone to carry the image of a loved one with them when far away. Miniatures were so personal that they sometimes even included hair belonging to the sitter, framed on the reverse of the object or crushed into pigments used for the portrait (such is the case with one of two portrait miniatures exhibited alongside this portrait of a young woman in a headwrap). We don’t know the name of the young woman from Suriname, but her portrait does give us a clue to her ancestry and status. The white headwrap is a distinctly Afro-Creole style also known as an ‘angisa’ in Suriname. These were worn by enslaved and free women of colour. Considering this sitter’s clothing and notably light skin tone, it is more likely that she was the latter: a free woman of colour in pre-abolition Suriname.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a new elite class of free people of colour was burgeoning in Suriname. They occupied positions previously reserved for whites and fulfilled increasingly prominent roles in the city’s economic, social and cultural life. This portrait indicates that they sat for miniatures, too. By the early nineteenth century, around the time that this portrait miniature was made, free people of colour had already outnumbered the white population in Suriname’s capital Paramaribo (by circa 3.000 to 2.000). 2 The confident portrayal of an Afro-Creole woman dressed in elegant European fashions on a traditionally Western medium hints at this changing social landscape in the Caribbean.
But close attention to this sitter’s skin tone is revealing for another reason. Painting skin was the most difficult and time-consuming part of creating a portrait miniature. It was also the most important. While early miniatures were made on vellum, by the eighteenth century, ivory replaced vellum as the most popular ground for portrait miniatures because of its superior ability to depict white skin. 3 Though the association between ivory and skin tone is much older, the prominent colonial exploit material finds renewed relevance in the eighteenth century: a period preoccupied with issues of race, in which whiteness was constructed as an ideal female virtue (paradoxically achieved in miniatures by using an exotic material imported from Africa). 4 As successful slave uprisings and a new coloured elite threatened increasingly unstable colonial taxonomies, miniatures on ivory grounds depicted their white female sitters with luminous, pale skin and bright, pink-tinted cheeks.
Yet this sitter’s skin tone is visibly darker than the white fabric of her clothing or the portrait’s ivory ground. In fact, while parts of her headwrap are made only with a translucent glaze, revealing the ivory underneath—a popular technique for miniaturists when portraying white skin, in which the ivory itself served as the primary shade—her skin is opaque. In its subversion of colonial materials for a non-white sitter, the portrait miniature hints at a deeper understanding of race as a human-made construct. Whether or not miniaturists intended to do so, their relationship to their materials already highlighted the fragility of such racial taxonomies: while praised for its ability to depict white skin, the ivory sheets used for miniatures still had to be shaved, bleached and smoothed to prepare the material for watercolour pigments. 5
In the end, this portrait miniature not only reminds visitors of the Rijksmuseum of the prominent role of free people of colour in Suriname, but also challenges us to reframe a traditionally Eurocentric genre in a new light. What other artists, sitters, and craftspeople worked on or sat for portrait miniatures in the Caribbean, for example? Because portrait miniatures were such intimate objects, the status of the artist was less important than the likeness of the portrait. You only needed a small and portable kit to make miniatures: one that was easy to travel with or put away at night. Because of this, many miniaturists were women—but people of colour would have benefited from this too. There would certainly have been a demand for small and portable objects that were tailored to people removed from loved ones in Suriname, a colony characterised by overseas travel and circum-Atlantic networks. 6 Much remains to be studied about the craftsmen and women that made portrait miniatures in the Caribbean, their sitters, and the materials they used. Having crossed oceans once again, this pocket-sized portrait takes us on a much larger journey through the eighteenth-century Dutch Atlantic world.
About the author
Damiët Schneeweisz is Johan Huizinga Fellow at the Rijksmuseum. Her work investigates colonial and postcolonial visual and material cultures. She is currently writing a book about portrait miniatures in the Dutch Atlantic world.
Citation
To cite this article please use the following citation: Schneeweisz, Damiët. Caribbean Treasures: A Portrait Miniature from Suriname. Published 22/03/2021. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Stories: Connecting Objects, [URL], last visited: [MM/DD/YY].
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Artist unknown, Portrait of a Surinamese Girl, c. 1805, 6.4 x 5.5 cm, Rijksmuseum, on display in room 1.17. The portrait is part of a larger collection of portrait miniatures, silhouettes, and other objects that came to the Rijksmuseum through a donation from the Dutch Administrator of Finance in Suriname in 1912. The items had remained there from deceased citizens’ unclaimed inventories.
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The white Dutch population was also in steady decline due to both high mortality rates and a changing economic system. While appealing investment funds had lured entrepreneurs to the colonies to build new plantations on borrowed money, by the late eighteenth century, it had become apparent that they would not be able to pay back their loans. Plantations were subcontracted to overseas merchant companies driven exclusively by profit and little regard for local conditions. By the 1790s, over two-thirds of planters were ‘absentee owners’ who lived in the Netherlands and only travelled to Suriname on occasion. See Sint Nicolaas, Eveline. Shackles and Bonds: Suriname and the Netherlands since 1600. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2018; Neslo, Ellen. Een Ongekende Elite: De opkomst van een gekleurde elite in koloniaal Suriname 1800-1863. De Bilt: Haes, 2016.
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See Kelly, Catherine E. ‘The Color of Whiteness: Picturing Race on Ivory.’ New Views of New England: Studies in Material and Visual Culture, 1680–1830, 82 (2012): 128-154. URL: https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/1380.
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See Rosenthal, Angela. ‘Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture.’ Art History 27, no. 4 (2004): 563–592. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0141-6790.2004.00438.x.
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See Lee, Key Jo. ‘Fragile Intimacies in the Portrait Miniature of Rose Tufts.’ Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, Recent Acquisitions (2017): 55-61. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26378749.
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Previous studies have indicated there was an overseas market for portrait miniatures in Asia. The portrait miniature of Elisabeth Bartlo in the Rotterdam Museum is an example of a miniature made of Dirk van Hogendorp’s wife and sent to family in the Netherlands to introduce her image. See also e.g. Coltman, Viccy. ‘Sojourning Scots and the Portrait Miniature in Colonial India, 1770s-1780s.’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 3 (2017): 421-441. DOI: 10.1111/1754-0208.12467.
