Negro Man in Straw Hat

William Berryman

From $69.00 View options

About this Work

Year 1815

Location Jamaica

Mood Earthy, Nostalgic, Thought-Provoking, Reflective

Subject Everyday Life, Village Life, People, Architecture

A deceptively simple image that rewards a second look. Berryman gives us a working man from behind — broad-brimmed straw hat, blue jacket, tan breeches — leaning into a post and working a strip of cane or palm, his hands occupied with some task just out of view. A second figure stands small in the middle distance, colonial buildings stretching across the background.

Berryman spent several years in Jamaica in the early 19th century filling sketchbooks with exactly this kind of close observation — tradespeople, laborers, street figures caught in unguarded moments. The turned back is a quietly radical compositional choice for the period, presenting the subject as a figure absorbed in his own world rather than on display for a European viewer.

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Meet the Artist

William Berryman

William Berryman was an English artist who spent nearly a decade in Jamaica, from 1808 to 1816, producing over three hundred pencil sketches and watercolors of the island's landscape and people. Where many of his contemporaries looked past the lives of the enslaved, Berryman trained his eye directly on them. He never lived to see his work published, but it survives today as one of the most intimate visual records of early 19th-century Jamaica.

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