Lot 224

Gross, Andreas Gelius

Estimate

10,000 - 15,000 USD

bidding is closed

Description

Album of 89 original drawings and watercolors. Danish West Indies, circa 1848-1849.
paper, ink, leather

A composite sketchbook of 89 drawings and watercolors, (8 3/4 x 7 1/8 in.; 223 x 18 mm.). Bound in later half cloth binding.

Catalogue Note

Interesting testimony of the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean Islands in 1848.

The drawings and watercolors include portraits of Danish, English, American, and Spanish ships, views taken in Christiansted, St Croix and the Danish free port Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas, the coast of La Guaira, Venezuela, sailors at Porto Cabello (Puerto Cabello, Venezuela), free people dancing, plantation scenes, soldiers, forts, and coastal profiles. The figure studies and subjects are contemporary and closely similar to the drawings of the Danish artist Fritz Melbye and the Charlotte Amalie native Camille Pissarro in St Thomas in the late 1840s and early 1850s.
The album is exactly contemporary with the abolition of slavery in the then Dano-Norwegian colony. A triangular trade has existed, exporting firearms into Africa in exchange for slaves to work the sugar plantations in the West Indies, with rum and sugar then exported from the islands to Demark and Norway. The trade collapsed with the official abolition of slavery in the islands in 1848. The islands (St Thomas, St John and St Croix) were eventually sold to the United States in 1917, becoming the US Virgin Islands.