William Berryman

William Berryman was an English artist whose most significant work was done far from home. Based in London in the early 1800s, he lived with his brother John on Great Portland Street, and the two exhibited together at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1802. They later contributed woodblock illustrations to John Thomas Smith's Antiquities of Westminster in 1807, a respectable if unspectacular start to what would become a quietly remarkable career.

By May 1808, Berryman had made his way to Jamaica, likely seeking the patronage of Edward Beeston Long, son of the wealthy plantation owner Edward Long. What he produced there over the following eight years tells a different story than most colonial-era art of the period. Rather than focusing on the grandeur of plantation estates or the social lives of the ruling class, Berryman turned his attention to the island's majority population: enslaved people of African and mixed descent. His more than three hundred pencil sketches and watercolors document their daily lives with a directness and specificity rarely seen in the art of his time.

He had plans to transform his Jamaican work into a series of engravings, but he died before that project could begin. His unpublished sketches were eventually gathered into an album that sat largely unnoticed until it was rediscovered and acquired by the United States Library of Congress. That rediscovery gave his work the audience it had never found in his lifetime. In 2007 and 2008, his drawings were exhibited at the Yale University Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, and at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, England, introducing Berryman to a new generation of scholars and art lovers.