Highlights

Julia Prest (University of St Andrews)

The playhouse most closely associated with the town of Port-au-Prince during the colonial era was built in 1777 and inaugurated with a performance of Martini and Durosoy’s Henri IV, ou la Bataille d’Ivry on 1 January 1778. However, public theatre also existed in Port-au-Prince prior to this date. There is occasional evidence of professional theatrical activity in the 1760s, including newspaper advertisements for performances in 1767 and 1768. On 29 January 1772, the Affiches américaines newspaper announced an upcoming event on 2 February to mark the (re)opening of the local theatre with newly-arrived actors performing Regnard’s Les Folies amoureuses and the opéra-comique, Annette et Lubin (by Favart and Blaise). It is not until 1777 that announcements for upcoming performances in Port-au-Prince become frequent—in the year prior to the opening of the so-called Mesplès playhouse.[1]

François Mesplès and his associate, Lasserre, were businessmen rather than theatre enthusiasts, and they were persuaded to build a playhouse on the place Vallière in Port-au-Prince because the agreement also involved the construction of a number of other buildings that could be used as businesses or dwellings. A set of detailed architectural drawings showing the place Vallière site (and another at the l’islet de l’Horloge) drawn up after the fact provide valuable information about the design of this wooden playhouse (by contrast, the bigger, grander playhouse in Cap-Français was made of stone). The seating plan features designated seating areas for several groups including colonial administrators and officers from the local garrison. In addition to the ground-level, the theatre had two tiers of boxes. 

Of these, fifteen of the second-level boxes at the back and along the side of the playhouse were designated as being “pour les gens de couleur” (for the free people of color). With an average of seven people in each box, the theatre could hold around 105 free people of color, i.e. approximately 14% of its full capacity of around 750 spectators. This policy of segregation, even supposing that it was enforced, does not mean that people from different social groups did not mix at (or en route to) the playhouse in Port-au-Prince. All spectators entered the building via the same narrow entrance, and (white) audience members seated in the first row of boxes used the same staircases as the free people of color who continued up another flight. Indeed, one argument put forward in the 1780s in favor of building a new playhouse was precisely the wish (on the part of some white audience members, at least) to have separate entrances.

What the drawings do not show is any space for enslaved people. While enslaved domestic servants who accompanied their “masters” to the playhouse did not have a designated seating or standing area, they will have spent time in the playhouse’s narrow corridors and even, when summoned, in the boxes themselves. They will sometimes, therefore, have overheard (and even overseen) portions of the works performed. Enslaved people in the playhouses of Saint-Domingue have been called “mitigated spectators”—mitigated because their access to the works was limited and mitigated, above all, because they were not there by choice. Although enslaved people are invisible in the theatre drawings, it is possible that they outnumbered the free people of color present.[2] Also difficult to discern are the diverse contributions made by enslaved people to other aspects of theatre-making. These include the work of assistant painters who helped with the stage sets, that of male and female hairdressers who prepared the actors’ wigs and the seamstresses who sewed and repaired the costumes.[3]

The Port-au-Prince theatre was not always a profitable enterprise, but it enjoyed hundreds of performances of opéras-comiques, comedies and works belonging to other genres from the late 1770s up to mid-November 1791. The Mesplès playhouse was where the local performer of mixed racial ancestry, Minette, made her name singing solo roles in the particularly popular genre of opéra-comique (featuring spoken and sung elements). A (then) enslaved violinist called Julien, who later enjoyed a successful musical career as a free man in France under the name Louis Julien Clarchies, performed a series of duets alongside a white violinist during a theatrical event in Port-au-Prince in 1783. Meanwhile, Mesplès’s long-serving enslaved domestic servant and skilled handyman, Louis, was the go-to person for any minor repairs to his buildings, including the playhouse.

When news of the French Revolution reached Saint-Domingue in September 1789, the editor of the Affiches américaines, Charles Mozard, hastily composed a metatheatrical response called La Répétition interrompue, which is set in the very playhouse in which it was performed on 4 October 1789. The work includes valuable, often satirical, references to theatre-making in that space, including the role of the prompt, and procedures for rehearsing. 

The slave revolts near Cap-Français that marked the beginning of the Haitian Revolution took place in August 1791. This led to civil unrest elsewhere in the colony, and in November 1791 a fire in Port-au-Prince destroyed, among other buildings, the Mesplès theatre. During the so-called Haitian revolution, theatrical activity was, unsurprisingly, sporadic at best, but there is evidence of public performances having taken place in Port-au-Prince after 1798 (when the pro-slavery British left the colony) and ongoing in 1802 on another part of the place Vallière. By this time, Saint-Domingue was no longer a slave society but now fighting for its full independence to ensure that this would remain the case.

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[1] Details of all performances documented in the local press can be found at https://www.theatreinsaintdomingue.org.

[2] For more on audiences, including “mitigated spectators”, see Julia Prest, Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), chapter 2, pp. 17-50.

[3] For more on these contributions, see Julia Prest, Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue, chapter 5, pp. 153-87.

Cite this post as: Julia Prest, “The Port-au-Prince Playhouse,” Colonial Networks (May 2025), https://www.colonialnetworks.org/?p=796

Mary Pedley (William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan)

The map entitled Plan de la plaine du Cap François en l’Isle St. Domingue is a fascinating example of cartographic composition and engraving skill (Fig. 1). It combines the measured detail of property surveys, the shaded values of topographical depiction, the soundings and nautical codes of a marine chart, and the presentation attributes of the print world in its ornate dedication and title cartouches and decorative frame. The seductive beauty of the map lies in aesthetic qualities that reinforce a claim to veracity and even accuracy. To assess such a claim, we must ask the basic questions of a primary source: who made it, where and when, by what method, for whom, and for what purpose.

Reading the Map

The Plan de la Plaine du Cap françois is a large map, nearly 82 by 104 cm (2 ½ by 3 feet).  It was published in two versions, one printed within an engraved decorative frame, and one printed without the frame, or trimmed very closely.^[1] A trompe l’oeil cartouche in the top right displays the title on a draped curtain supported by monkeys on either side; two additional monkeys join snakes slithering up the supports, and two allegorical female figures recline in the shade of a parasol. The full title reads: Plan de la Plaine du Cap françois en l’Isle St. Domingue, Rédigé d’après les dernières Opérations Geometriques Des Ingénieurs du Roy Par René Phelipeau, Ingénieur Géographe A Paris 1786. (Plan of the plain of Cap Français on the island of Saint Domingue, edited according to the latest geometrical operations of the engineers of the King by René Phelipeau, Geographical Engineer, at Paris 1786.) A further ornate cartouche at the bottom left, comprising a coronet and coat of arms flanked by nude winged figures, frames the dedication to the comte de Vaudreuil, that is, Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud (1740–1817), a Paris-based courtier and art collector whose father had been the colonial governor of Saint Domingue.

The bottom left corner also includes the letters A.P.D.R. (Avec Privilege du Roi), indicating royal copyright protection, and underneath that is “Rue St Jacques No. 45,” Phelipeau’s Paris address, implying that the map could be acquired there.^[2] At the center bottom the scale is indicated: approximately 1:28,000, which is a  standard military map scale of the period (ca. 2 ½ inches to a mile). The geodetic coordinates of Cap François are given in the margins: “Longitude Occidentale 74d 38m 25s du Meridien de Paris,” and “Le Cap a l’Eglise 19d 46m 24d Latitude Nord.” A compass above the scale bar shows us that the map is oriented to the south; thus north is at the bottom of the map.

The contents of the map depict three layers of information about the space around the city of Cap François: first, the land as physical space of mountain, plain, rivers, and watersheds, with the sea marking its coastline; second, the land as property bounded and claimed by named proprietors; and third, the city’s place on the globe, determined by its coordinates of longitude and latitude. The mapmaking techniques of lines, dots, numbers, words, and symbols render these layers visible. The manual addition of color after printing further clarifies the content. For example, the sea is differentiated from land in two ways: soundings (numbers representing depths, usually in fathoms or six feet) are placed in the bay of Cap François and to the east near the Bourg de l’Embarcadère de Limonade; dotted lines outline the shoals of both the bay of Cap François and the bay further to the west of Acul. A pale green was added to all copies so far observed to outline the coast. 

On land, line work assumes a different function. Dotted straight lines show the boundaries of property ownership of the habitations (plantations), most probably of sugar production, a product implied rather than shown. At higher elevations, coffee would have been cultivated. On some habitations, dots and squares represent the main house, outbuildings, and quarters for enslaved workers, representations that could be specific to a particular habitation or generic, as most sugar plantations followed a standard arrangement of structures to increase productivity (Fig. 2). Words provide the names of putative owners. Ongoing research for this project aims to determine whether these were in fact the owners in 1786, the date of the map, or whether a habitation name reflects a former owner or serves as a place name. Social status is shown by an owner’s title (e.g. le Cmt de Vaudreuil, Le Mqs de Paroy, Cte de Raynaud de Villevert, Chr de Lacombe); gender may be noted (e.g. Mme Bremont, Mme la Vi[comtess]e de Castellane, Vve Blanfossé); and the status of a free person of color of either gender by the designation of “n.l.” for “négre libre” or “négresse libre” (e.g., Nicolas n.l., Rose n.l.)

Hachures (short engraved lines) are used to show elevation of the physical landscape: lines that are closer together depict steeper slopes, creating a shaded effect in engraved printing. If watercolor is added, it emphasizes the shading. Summits, which appear white, are left free from linework to emphasize the height. Rivers and creeks are engraved with sinuous lines—parallel lines for larger rivers, and single lighter lines for smaller creeks and rivulets. A variety of parallel lines differentiate properties: some are unbroken, some are dotted, some are a thicker line paired with a lighter line. As there is no key, we can surmise that these may not only show property boundaries but also irrigation ditches or canals, a vital part of sugar production, and a shared investment by property owners.  

The Author

 René Phelipeau (1752 – ?) signs himself as “ingénieur géographe” in the title and as “géographe” in his dedication to Vaudreuil. In neither case does he append “du roi” to this style, so he was not a member of the ingénieurs-géographes du roi (geographical engineers of the king), who belonged to a specialized corps that were subsidized by the royal purse from the time of Louis XIV, and whose charge was to create topographical maps of military and strategic importance for the King and his army.^[3] As an independent geographer or engineer or both, he was either self-taught or instructed by an elder who trained him in design and presentation, measuring and scale. 

Whether Phelipeau ever worked in Saint Domingue is a mystery. A specialized group of ingénieurs géographes were sent to the island in the 1760s to perform large scale topographical surveys on orders from the ministry of the Marine, the department of state responsible for overseas colonies.^[4] Phelipeau’s name is not among them, nor is it among the engineers responsible for fortifications and infrastructure on the island. Nor is he mentioned as a local surveyor (arpenteur), who performed property surveys of individual habitations or localities, surveys used in property sales, lawsuits, inheritances, and other legal situations. 

Context of the Map’s Production

Phelipeau’s career as a mapmaker is uneven, with very few maps attributed to him prior to the outpouring of Saint Domingue maps: seventeen engraved and printed maps of the colony produced between 1785 and 1790. Five of these are large wall maps, all similar in size, style, and scale to four other maps, measuring ca. 80-90 by 60-90 cm, printed from two plates, showing the topography of the environs and any towns in plan.^[5] Four of the five are dedicated to titled persons who either held government office or were major landholders on the island: Plan de la ville du Cap Français et de ses environs : avec ses augmentations et changements projettés, 1785, dedicated to the maréchal de Castries, minister of state and the Marine;^[6] Plan de la plaine du Cap François en l’Isle St. Domingue, 1786, dedicated to Vaudreuil; Plan de la plaine du fond de l’Isle à Vache de l’Isle St Domingue, 1786 (no dedication); Plan de la ville des Cayes, dans l’Isle Saint-Domingue, 1786, dedicated to César Henri, comte de la Luzerne, governor general of the Leeward Islands (sous le vent); Plan du quartier de l’Artibonite, Isle St. Domingue; refermant les paroisses de St. Marc, de la Petite Rivière et des Verettes, 1790, dedicated to the comte d’Agoult, chevalier du l’ordre de St Louis, St Lazare. Each of these maps was printed within the same decorative frame, suitable for hanging on a wall. Some copies survive with the frame trimmed, allowing for dissection and pasting onto a linen backing, which allows the map to be folded and stored in a case, suitable for carrying.

In addition to Phelipeau’s large wall maps are twelve printed smaller plans of port cities in Saint Domingue, which were available separately (each has an address in Paris) or gathered into the Recueil de vues des lieux principaux de la Colonie Françoise de Saint-Domingue, gravées par les soins de M. Ponce, accompagnées de cartes et plans de la même colonie, gravés par les soins de M. Phelipeau….. Paris, 1791. (Fig 3). They are similar in size, scope, style, and content. Dated 1785 are plans of  Leogane, Port au Prince,  and Saint Marc. Dated 1786 are Tiberon^[7], Petit Goave, St Louis, Mole St. Nicolas, Jacmel, Fort Dauphin, Les Cayes,  Port de Paix,  and a smaller version of Cap François. They measure between 40-45 cm high by 26-36 cm wide; the plan of Cap François is slightly larger than the rest at 60 x 44 cm. Each shows the topography of the environs with habitations and owners, the layout of the town in plan, the soundings in the harbor, if known, a compass to show orientation, a consistent scale in units of toises, and the precise longitude and latitude of each place. Coloring is sometimes added, at the discretion of the owner or upon the instruction of the seller, but on extant copies a distinct consistency and similarity of colors and shades suggest that Phelipeau may have supervised the coloring. 

The Map’s Sources and Publisher

The title of the Plan de la plaine de la ville du Cap tells us that the map was “compiled based on the latest geometric observations of the royal engineers.”On the face of it this would refer to the (unfinished) topographical survey performed in the 1760s by the ingénieurs-géographes du roi, or even more recent surveys by resident engineers. How did Phelipeau have access to these maps, if he was not present in Saint Domingue?  The answer may lie with Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint Méry (1750-1819), a Creole lawyer, publisher, and politician, who spent much of his life living in and writing about Saint Domingue. Phelipeau is listed as one of the publishers of the Receuil des vues, along with the engraver Nicolas Ponce (1746-1831) and Moreau de Saint Méry. The Receuil was designed to accompany the latter’s six volume work, the Loix et constitutions des colonies françoises de l’Amérique sous le Vent, published between 1784 and 1790 (the same period in which Phélipeau’s maps of Saint Domingue were printed).  Moreau de Saint-Méry’s dense work comprised transcriptions of laws and ordonnances from both the government in France and locally on Saint Domingue, arranged in chronological order from 1550 to 1785, covering a wide range of topics and situations. The Discours Préliminaire, found in the first volume, outlines the author’s goals of wishing to understand the current legal structure of the colony in order to improve it and to provide for fellow lawyers like himself a law code of statutes already on the books. Moreau de Saint Méry closes the Discours by thanking those who helped make the voluminous work possible, including M. Dumesnil, the surveyor at Plaisance; M. Rabié, colonel in the Infantry and Engineer in Chief at Cap François; Hesse, Sorel, and Moreau, ordinary engineers; and M. Pinard de la Roziere, principal surveyor at Saint Marc. “They have furnished me with the greater part of the plans of places and public monuments of Saint Domingue which form, with the general map of the island, the engraving of the Historic part [of this work].”^[8]

René-Gabriel Rabié, Charles-François Hesse, Antoine-François Sorrel, and Jean-Baptiste Moreau were engineer-geographers on Saint Domingue.^[9] Sorrel and Moreau participated in the topographical surveys of 1763-69; Hesse arrived later. The topographical survey work of all these engineers would have served Phelipeau well in his compilation of the plans of towns and environs. The sources for the marine soundings and geodetic coordinates of longitude and latitude could have come from the work of naval officer-scientists Claret de Fleurieu, Verdun de la Crenne, and Chastenet, comte de Puységur, who traveled on separate voyages to the Antilles between 1768 and 1785 to test the chronometers of Ferdinand Berthoud, as part of on-going efforts to establish a more reliable means of ascertaining longitude.^[10] The teams led by these three marine officers concentrated on measuring longitude and latitude and on more accurate soundings in harbors. The observations from the 1784-85 voyage of Chastenet de Puységur most closely match those found on the Saint Domingue plans of Phelipeau, though in several cases the longitude is found to differ by one full degree. Whether this was an error of transcription or Phelipeau was following some other unknown source remains to be determined.

Why the Maps of Saint Domingue

Considering Phelipeau’s maps of Saint Domingue in relation to Moreau de Saint Méry’s work explains several aspects of their production. The maps were likely designed to accompany both the publication of the Loix et constitutions and the next work on Saint Domingue by the same author, the Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie francaise de l’isle Saint-Domingue…par M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry (Paris, 1797-98). Throughout the later work, Moreau de Saint-Méry refers either to specific maps or to the “Atlas,” which he explains in the Avertissement of the first volume: “The atlas I speak of many times in this work is however independent of it so that one might take one without the other; nonetheless it is easy to understand that a description acquires much more clarity with the plans and perspective views.”^[11] References to the “atlas” within the Description point to plans included in the Recueil des vues. The Recueil, in its role accompanying the Loix et constitutions, was available to subscribers at a reduced price (title page: 48 livres en feuilles; 36 livres pour les souscripteurs). These subscribers are listed in four of the volumes of Loix et constitutions. Among them are three of the dedicatees of the four large Phelipeau maps of Saint Domingue: the comtes de Vaudreuil, Luzerne, and d’Agoult. And although the fourth dedicatee, the marquis de Castries, does not appear as an individual subscriber, as state minister of the Marine he may have been included in the large order from Louis XVI, who ordered 104 copies of the six-volume work. 

Given these close connections, it is possible that Moreau de Saint-Méry financed the production, engraving, and printing of Phelipeau’s maps and views, which were sold separately or as part of the Recueil des vues. The engraving may have been executed in the workshop of Ponce or that of André Basset, at an address on the Rue St Jacques similar to Phelipeau’s. We suggest that Phelipeau was the compiler of the maps and plans based on the cartographic materials of local surveyors and engineers that Moreau de Saint Méry brought with him from Saint Domingue to Paris, and on the soundings and geodetic coordinates published from scientific marine voyages to the Antilles in the 1770 and 1780s.

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^[1] Extant copies of the map are few: Library of Congress, G4944.C3G46 1786 .P5, as linked, with decorative frame; William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Maps 8-I-1786 Ph, no decorative frame ; the Historic New Orleans Collection, Williams Research Center, Object File name: LP000321, colored but no frame;  the Archives departmentales de la Gironde, 61/J 70/21/[1780], in a case, only the right half of the map, no frame.

^[2] This same address appears on most of Phelipeau’s maps of Saint Domingue discussed below. On the privilège du roi see Mary Sponberg Pedley, “Privilege and Copyright,” The History of Cartography, Volume Four: Cartography in the European Enlightenment, ed. Matthew H. Edney and Mary Sponberg Pedley (Chicago, 2019), 1115-1119, esp. 1116 for France. 

^[3] Henri Berthaut, Les Ingénieurs-géographes militaires 1624-1831, Étude historique (Paris: Imprimerie de la service géographique, 1902).

^[4] Jean-Louis Glénisson, “La cartographie de Saint-Domingue dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (de 1763 à la Révolution),” thesis, École nationale des Chartes, 1986; “Topographical Surveying in the French West Indies,” in Edney and Pedley, eds., Cartography in the European Enlightenment, 437-9. 

^[5] The join of the papers printed from the two plates of the 1784 proof plate of Plan de la ville du Cap Français et ses environs may be seen running down the middle of the map; the join between the surrounding neat line and longitude frame is visible. See Ruderman copy.

^[6] A proof copy of 1784 was offered for sale by Barry Ruderman. The copy at the University of Florida, Gainesville has no decorative frame and is in a boxed set with three other large plans, mentioned here: the Plan de la plaine du fond de l’Isle à Vache, the Plan du quartier de l’Artibonite, and Plan de la ville des Cayes.

^[7] A digital image of the plans of Tiberon and St. Louis may be found in the Gallica copy of the Recueil des vues, 1791.

^[8] Moreau de Saint Méry, Discours Préliminaire, Loix et constitutions des colonies françoises de l’Amérique sous le Vent, Paris, 1784, vol. 1, pp. xxiv-xxv.

^[9] Glénisson, “La cartographie de Saint-Domingue.” Examples of their work may be found in the archives of the Service Hydrographique de la Marine, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the collections of the Depot de la Guerre, Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer. See, for example, Plan de la plaine du Cul-de-Sac du Port-au-Prince, isle de Saint-Domingue levé / par Mr. de Hesse [ca.1780] ;  Carte de la côte du Cap depuis le Carénage jusques et compris le port Français / Levée par le Sr. Rabié, …1746); and Carte de la plaine de Miragôane / Levée par nous, Off. d’Inf. Ingénieur Géographe des Camps et Armées du Roy, Sorrel, 1767.

^[10] Charles Pierre Claret de Fleurieu, Voyage fait par ordre du roi en 1768 et 1769, à différentes parties du monde, pour éprouver en mer les horloges marines inventées par M. Ferdinand Berthoud….Paris, 1773; Jean Antoine Verdun, marquis de la Crenne, Voyage fait par ordre du Roi en 1771 et 1772, en diverses parties de l’Europe, de l’Afrique et de l’Amérique… Paris, 1778; Antoine Hyacinthe Anne Chastenet, comte de Puységur, Le pilote de l’isle de Saint-Domingue et des Débouquemens de cette isle … Paris, 1787. That Moreau de Saint Méry was familiar with their surveys is clear in the Description topographique: see, for example, vol. 1, 554, 705 (with coordinates of Fleurieu for Port au Paix).

^[11] Moreau de Saint Méry, Avertissement, Description topographique,… de la partie francaise de l’isle Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1787), vol. 1,  n.p.

Cite this post as: Mary Pedley, “René Phelipeau and the Plan de la Plaine du Cap François, 1786,” Colonial Networks (May 2025), https://www.colonialnetworks.org/?p=780

David Pullins (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

In June 1802, a well-established Parisian painter, Rose-Adélaïde Ducreux (1761-1802), sketched the disembarkment in Port-au-Prince of the seventy-four-gun Zélé warship that over the past four months had brought her safely from Brest.[1] It was one of forty-five ships that set sail as part of Napoleon’s efforts to quell the uprising led by Toussaint Louverture. On board, on April 1, 1802, Ducreux had married François-Jacques Lequoy de Montgirard, government commissioner and prefect for Saint-Domingue. Upon arrival, a wedding feast was held for them by General Pierre Bénezech attended by members of the colonial administration, including Napoleon’s brother-in-law and head of the fleet, General Charles LeClerc. 

Ducreux’s sketch was among the tokens she exchanged with her solicitous relatives in France, notably her adoring father, Marie-Antoinette’s portraitist, Joseph Ducreux.  She also sent samples of coffee, sugar, snuff and other Caribbean products, while portrait miniatures of the Ducreux family arrived in Saint-Domingue.[2] This lively trans-Atlantic conversation lasted only a few weeks, however, for by the end of July Rose Ducreux had died of yellow fever, a disease that swept through the fleet upon landing and significantly contributed to Toussaint’s advantage.  Their well-attended wedding festivities—already so densely woven into French colonial movement—in fact aided in the disease’s spread, and their host, Bénezech, was among those who quickly succumbed.

It is difficult not to hear a remorseful echo of those celebrations at the end of August, when the newly widowed Montgirard outlined the disadvantages of a proposal to build a public theater in Port-au-Prince. His first concern were recent political events, prompting the question of mixing audiences of different skin tones, but he then pointed to the fact that a warm, heavily populated auditorium in a city with “insalubrious air” was “extremely dangerous to the health of our Europeans and would help prolong or even propagate the cruel scourge that has plagued us for so long.”[3] Public gatherings were, of course, integral to eighteenth-century cultural life in Paris, though whether in France or Saint-Domingue their regulation was always shaped by political stakes and social regulation. For Montgirard these politics were personal, as a letter to him concerning the yellow fever epidemic from the naval commander of the French expedition, Villaret-Joyeuse, acknowledges. In a touching closing from September 12, Villaret-Joyeuse writes, “adieu my friend, may friendship bring some small consolation to your heart.”[4]

Arriving in Port-au-Prince, Rose Ducreux would have rightly considered herself a prominent portraitist of the Salon exhibitions, where she first showed a grand, full-length self-portrait in 1791 (Fig. 1).[5] In an attestation to the Revolutionary government in 1794 appealing to keep shared lodgings in the Louvre, her father had written, “I ask my judges to note the public voice and works that Rose Ducreux has showed at several Salons.”[6] Prior to the Revolution, neither she nor her father could exhibit at the official Salon, for they were not members of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, whose regulations would have been additionally onerous for Rose given the limits set on female membership. Rather, she showed regularly at the Salon de la Correspondence starting in 1786, then consistently at the official Salon from 1791 through 1799.

We can only guess at what compelled Rose Ducreux to leave behind a loving family and successful career. A private passenger on a military ship, perhaps she anticipated the quick solidification of a stable, colonial society in which transplanted Frenchmen and women would commission portraits.  Her Self-portrait signals a broader fashionable interest in a world of commodities exchanged globally, but omits obvious references to the Caribbean: the urn resembles Wedgwood sources signaling French Anglomanie of the 1780s, while her striped silk dress originates in the fashion for so-called siamoises, patterns brought from Siam since the seventeenth century. A powerful drawing attributed to Ducreux’s father depicting a Black man, possibly a portrait of Olaudah Equiano, records the family’s intersection with empire and enslavement from Europe, but none of her known works appear to depict persons of color.[7] The distinctly colonial direction taken in Rose Ducreux’s biography coalesces most clearly with her courtship and marriage. An ivory portrait miniature by her father evidently representing her future husband in the early 1790s suggests that their families had known each other for years before.[8]  Active in Martinique as early as the seventeenth century, Montgirard’s family held deep connections to French colonialism, and he himself held posts in Dominica, Tobago, Saint Lucy and Guyana before heading to Saint-Domingue. In contrast to this dense professional and family network, colonial France is nowhere obvious in Ducreux’s many surviving paintings or art critics’ reactions to them—though perhaps it need not be and, in fact, the things she sent home in Saint-Domingue are indicative enough. Coffee, sugar and snuff were ephemeral yet everywhere present in her Parisian life. So while nothing so dramatic nor politically entangled as Ducreux’s final year could be predicted by her earlier art or biography, this abrupt lack of transition is perhaps all the more revealing of eighteenth-century Parisian lives and livelihoods, invisible on the surface and yet always already colonial.

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[1] Main sources are Georgette Lyon, Joseph Ducreux, premier peintre de Marie-Antoinette, 1735-1802: sa vie, son œuvre (Paris: La Nef de Paris, 1958), esp. 74, 79-80, 111-12; Joseph Baillio, “Une artiste méconnue: Rose Adélaïde Ducreux,” L’Œil, no. 399 (October 1988), 20-27.

[2] Lyon, Joseph Ducreux, 112.

[3] I am very grateful to Meredith Martin for this reference and its connection to Montgirard’s wife.  Archives nationales d’outre mer, COL F6 5 No. 149B. Dated 23 fructidor year X (August 30, 1802).

[4] COL F6 No. 5, no. 149A.

[5] Katharine Baetjer, French Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019), 350-52 (no. 117).  Also see the object file with research by Francesca Whitlam-Cooper and online entry.

[6] Lyon, Joseph Ducreux, 96.

[7] While the attribution of this drawing has remained uncertain, it has strong technical and formal similarities to a Head of a Gentleman (ca.1770-80; National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1991.23.2.a) accepted as the work of Joseph Ducreux.

[8] Sold Paris, Hotel Drouot, Binoche et Giquello, March 30, 2012, Lot 91.

Cite this post as: David Pullins, “Always Already Colonial: Rose Ducreux in Port-au-Prince,” Colonial Networks (April 2025), https://www.colonialnetworks.org/?p=772

Meredith Martin (New York University)

Collaboration and conversation are central to our Colonial Networks project. On November 8, 2024, we hosted two workshops at NYU’s Center for the Humanities to discuss, critique, and generate new ideas for two project components that we are currently developing. One of these workshops, which Hannah Williams has written about in a separate post, considered how to “unsettle” museum collections and tell new stories about art objects through digital and decolonial approaches to provenance. In the other workshop—discussed here—we explored how to use critical counter-mapping as a tool for 1) subverting dominant narratives of colonial maps of Haiti/Saint-Domingue; and 2) re-ontologizing these maps with stories of Black life and resistance.

We’re grateful that our colleague Christy Pichichero (George Mason University), a leading scholar of French history and Black studies who has led efforts to promote diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism across the humanities, offered to co-organize and run the session with us.

The Silencing of Colonial Maps

The Colonial Networks project grew out of our desire to “map” and examine largely unknown connections between Haiti/Saint-Domingue and the Paris art world during the late 18^th and early 19^th Centuries. Our starting point for analyzing these connections were late 18^th C. colonial property maps of Saint-Domingue, among them René Phelipeau’s plan of the area around the town of Cap-Français (Cap-Haïtien) shown below. The land depicted on this map is divided up into plantation boundaries, all of them bearing the names of mostly white absentee planters, which together read like a “who’s who” of the Paris art world, with the names of major collectors, patrons, dealers, and even artists and architects represented.

Maps like Phelipeau’s, on the one hand, reveal the profound, disturbing links between land ownership and enslavement in Saint-Domingue and the production and consumption of art in the French metropole. But they also occlude the stories of generations of Black men and women who lived, loved, and labored in these spaces and resisted the oppression and erasure they imposed. We want to create an alternative, layered version of this map that acknowledges (following Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot) its “silencing” of the past while also aiming to center Black and Indigenous geographies and restore some sense of the human and ecological devastation it embodies. While other components of the Colonial Networks project consider how the exploitation of human beings and natural resources in Haiti/Saint-Domingue fueled the growth of the Paris art world, this part of the project focuses on the vibrant visual and material culture of Haiti itself, notably via stories of the many enslaved and free artisans and laborers who played a vital role.

The Workshop: Conversations on Counter-Mapping

Since we (Hannah and I) are not specialists in Caribbean or Haitian history, Black studies, or Black digital humanities, we were very aware of the need to learn from other scholars who have been doing innovative work in these areas. We also wanted to hear from map specialists about the creation and agendas of colonial property maps and from musicologists about how one might reanimate lives and stories through sound. Along with Christy Pichichero, we were honored that so many scholars whose work has inspired our own joined us for this workshop, and we are grateful for their time and input: Arielle Alterwaite (University of Pennsylvania), Marlene Daut (Yale University), Julia Doe (Columbia University), Dani Ezor (Kenyon College), Alex Gil Fuentes (Yale), Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins University), Bertie Mandelblatt (John Carter Brown Library), Siobhan Mei (University of Massachusetts Amherst), David Pullins (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Cloe Gentile Reyes (NYU). We were also joined by members of our NYU-based project team: Lucy Appert, Selin Ozulkulu, and Zhiyang Wang.

Christy started us off with an overview of the field of critical cartography, beginning with Brian Harley’s 1988 essay “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” whose foundational insights continue to resonate:

Harley’s observation that European maps actively promoted territorial appropriation and dispossession certainly pertains to the plan by Phelipeau, whose trompe l’oeil frame suggests it could have been hung in a Parisian townhouse and used to flaunt territorial claims by absentee planters. It is biased both in foregrounding the names of mostly French landowners and colonial districts and in suggesting a neat, orderly parceling of space where agricultural exploitation and human habitation is minimized. The presence of the many thousands of enslaved African and Afro-descended laborers who lived on these properties, for instance, is alluded to only by tiny squares denoting slave cabins in neat rows.

The individual lives, struggles, relations, and resistance of these enslaved individuals, who often charted their own counter-geographies and traversed property boundaries in order to share knowledge, build community, and fight oppression, are completely absent. Inspired by the work of several scholars, among them John Garrigus and Catherine MacKittrick, as well as digital humanities projects led and supported by some of our workshop participants (notably Alex Gil Fuentes and Jessica Johnson), we discussed how one might bring these Black lives and geographies to the forefront.

One approach we considered was to feature the work of modern Haitian and Caribbean diasporic artists who reimagine the past by portraying historical events for which we have no surviving visual record. For example: by honing in on just one small slice of our property map, like the detail shown above, we can see plantations “belonging” to such noted Parisian art world figures as Vaudreuil, Choiseul, and the comte de Vergennes. But one could tell a different story by indicating that this was the same territory where Toussaint Louverture was born and lived (on the Breda plantation); where the Bois-Caïman ceremony, a key event precipitating the Haitian Revolution, took place; and where the Battle of Vertières, a decisive turning point in the struggle for Haitian independence, was fought. Many artists have visualized these figures and events, from the 20^th C. Haitian painter Jacques-Richard Chéry to the contemporary artist Raphaël Barontini, whose 2023-24 installation at the Paris Panthéon, together with a related exhibition entitled Dare Freedom, filled in important gaps in the Panthéon’s selective vision of Revolutionary liberty.

Our workshop participants had a range of responses to the cartographic, visual, and archival material we presented. (“I hate that map!” was one of the first ice-breaking responses.) They also had helpful suggestions on how to engage public and community audiences beyond art history, and to bring in Black and Indigenous perspectives. We discussed the importance of forging a dialogue with scholars and stakeholders in Haiti, and of thinking about how our project relates to Haiti’s ongoing crisis today. We aren’t sure what our critical counter-map will ultimately look like. It might resemble a pilot project created in Fall 2024 with graduate students from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, although we may use a different format as well as animation and sound elements. But as one of our participants noted at the end of the session, the only way forward is to start doing the work, to acknowledge self-doubts and limitations, and to welcome advice and help when it’s offered.

Cite this post as: Meredith Martin, “Black Geographies of Art in Haiti/Saint-Domingue: A Workshop on Critical Counter Maps and Digital Humanities,” Colonial Networks (February 2025), https://www.colonialnetworks.org/?p=755

Hannah Williams (Queen Mary University of London)

One of the key collaborative activities of our 2024 program for the Colonial Networks project were two workshops we ran at NYU’s Center for the Humanities on November 8, 2024. This post is about the workshop we titled Unsettling Collections: The Paris Art World and Haiti/Saint-Domingue, which brought together a group of museum curators, scholars, auction house specialists, and collections researchers to imagine new ways of telling stories about French art through digital approaches to provenance histories.

The other workshop we ran that day was titled Critical Counter-Mapping Black Geographies of Art in Haiti/Saint-Domingue, and we’ve written about that in a separate note.

Unsettling Collections

The idea for “unsettling collections” came out of the branch of our project focused on Connecting Paris & Haiti/Saint-Domingue, which explores the profound links between members of the eighteenth-century Paris art world and their colonial activities in Haiti/Saint-Domingue. One of the main components we’ve been researching is plantation owners and colonial administrators who are now better known (among French art historians, at least) as important French art collectors, among them the comte de Vaudreuil (1740-1817), Jean-Joseph de Laborde (1724-1794), and members of the extended Choiseul family. We’re comparatively mapping the properties these people owned in Paris and in Haiti/Saint-Domingue, researching their activities as enslavers and the wealth they generated from colonial commerce, and tracing the vast number of artworks from their collections that, owing in part to the upheavals of the French and Haitian Revolutions, ended up in public museums throughout Europe and the U.S. The screenshot below is a slide that visually summarizes the material intersections of this research into people, property, and objects.

One result of this research is a growing dataset of eighteenth-century French artworks which are—as a result of their provenance stories—directly or indirectly implicated in the disturbing colonial histories of Haiti/Saint-Domingue. As much as this research “unsettles” the histories of these eighteenth-century Parisian art collections, it also provides an opportunity to productively disrupt and reorient the current museum collections in which these objects now reside.

That was the objective behind the Unsettling Collections workshop: exploring with curators how we can tell new stories and engage new audiences through reimagined approaches to provenance – and vitally – how digital spaces and opportunities might address some of the many challenges posed by such an endeavor.

The Workshop: Conversations and Thoughts

We invited a group of curators and collections researchers, all of whom either work in museums that currently hold objects from our dataset, or who work with colonial provenance in some way. We’re extremely grateful to these colleagues for generously sharing their time, expertise, and creativity to come together and exchange ideas: Taylor Alessio (Christie’s); Esther Bell (Clark Art Institute); Marie-Laure Buku Pongo (The Frick Collection); Laura Sofia Hernandez Gonzalez (Museo de Arte de Ponce); Yuriko Jackall (Detroit Institute of Art); Elyse Nelson (Metropolitan Museum of Art); Guillaume Nicoud (Archivio del Moderno, Università della Svizzera Italiana); Christy Pichichero (George Mason University); David Pullins (Metropolitan Museum of Art); and Perrin Stein (Metropolitan Museum of Art). The other workshop participants were ourselves (Meredith Martin and Hannah Williams) and members of our NYU-based project team: Lucy Appert, Selin Ozulkulu, and Zhiyang Wang.

Collectively, the provenance histories of the artworks in our dataset reveal crucial insights into connections among the French metropolitan art world, colonial economies, and enslavement in the eighteenth century. But these are often difficult to stories to tell within the gallery, or even within a single institution.

Within the gallery, provenance stories aren’t always the most pertinent details to foreground in the restricted modes of in-gallery interpretation available. For example, the comte de Vaudreuil owned two paintings that are now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Julie looking in a Mirror of 1787 and Bartholomeus Breenbergh’s Preaching of John the Baptist of 1634. Vaudreuil was friends with Vigée Le Brun, and the two (along with Vigée Le Brun’s art dealer husband) were key figures in what we’re calling the “colonial networks” of the Paris art world. So in the case of the Met’s Vigée Le Brun painting, its provenance connections to Vaudreuil and his enslaving activities, which formed the basis for his wealth, would be a highly relevant detail for inclusion in a wall label, providing a crucial aspect of its history for museum visitors. But it’s quite different in the case of the Breenbergh painting. For this seventeenth-century religious landscape by a Dutch artist, which wasn’t acquired by Vaudreuil until over a century after it was made, this episode or “event” from its longer provenance history is not the most relevant detail to include on a wall label for contemporary museum visitors.

These complex stories are also difficult to tell within a single institution, not least due to the vast dispersal of these objects after they left their eighteenth-century collections. Vaudreuil’s artworks, for instance, are now held in scores of museums around the world, including the Met in New York, the National Galleries of Art in London and in Washington, D.C., the Wallace Collection in London, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, and the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico (to name but a few).

Digital approaches can provide scope for overcoming these kinds of challenges, and that was the focus of our conversations in the workshop. We discussed the role that provenance—typically presented as a dry, highly systematized list of names whose stories and significance are not evident to most readers—plays in different kinds of museum interpretation (from the wall label to the museum website), and we considered examples of objects with provenances tied to French histories of colonialism and enslavement and how these links are currently communicated (or not). Throughout the workshop, lots of valuable comments and ideas were raised about the needs and interests of different audiences, the political pressures that museums face, and the vast potential of museum websites and social media channels as a space to animate provenance and, in so doing, to complicate and enrich the lives of objects.

Building on these valuable and on-going conversations with curators, we are currently working with our digital team to prototype one approach to animating provenance in this way, working with some key objects that have emerged from our research.

Cite this post as: Hannah Williams, “Unsettling Collections: A Workshop with Museum Curators and Collections Researchers,” Colonial Networks (January 2025), https://www.colonialnetworks.org/?p=628