Joseph Savart:
Four Creole women - Quatre femmes Creoles

Fig. 1 - Joseph
Savart (1735-1801)- Quatre femmes créoles (1770), Collection Musée Schoelcher,
Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe

Fig. 1 -
Joseph Savart (1735-1801)- Quatre femmes créoles (1770), Collection Musée
Schoelcher, Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe

Article by
Séverine Laborie

Conservatrice
des monuments historiques à la Direction régionale des affaires culturelles de
la Nouvelle Aquitaine

(translation by Dickie Zebregs)

The recent appearance on the art market of
four new pastels signed by the French painter Joseph Savart (Reims 1735 -
Saint-Pierre, Martinique 1801) renews an unprecedented event that occurred in
2009 when a first pastel came up for sale in Paris. Signed and dated, the
“Quatre femmes créoles” were made in Guadeloupe in 1770 (Fig. 1). The
Schoelcher Museum in Pointe-à-Pitre (Guadeloupe) was able to acquire it, thus
offering the people of Guadeloupe the opportunity to contemplate a unique work.
It sheds light on a forgotten and unknown painting produced by an adventurous
artist who went to the French colonies of the West Indies in the 18th century
to seek his fortune. These four new works from the corpus of Joseph Savart,
executed in Guadeloupe and predating the Schoelcher drawing by a few months,
contribute to a better understanding of
the artist and his interests and confirm previous hypotheses regarding the
meaning of these representations.(1)

Rare and unique works of art

While collectors have long been interested
in the art produced in the former French and English colonies of the Americas,
the study of 18th-century French painting in the West Indies is still recent
and thus suffers from a limited corpus and fragmentary archives.(2) In the
context of early colonisation, neither local elites nor the colonial
administration encouraged the development of artistic life, and it is very rare
to find in the archives any trace of the existence of career artists who
settled permanently. At the very end of the 18th century and during the 19th
century, after the colonial system of the Ancien Régime had been shaken up for
the first time, small advertisements in the press attest to the existence of an
art market in the West Indies. Sales of supplies for artists, framers’
advertisements, or sales of paintings constitute so many indirect traces of
activity and of an interest in the pictorial arts that must have existed
previously but of which we have very few examples.(3)

Indeed, this important movable heritage was
destroyed at various points in time. In the French West Indies or French
Caribbean, many properties were burnt down during revolutionary unrest and
during the constant wars between the French and the British; others were lost
during natural or accidental disasters. The works that escaped such a dire
fate, being fragile by nature, may simply have succumbed to the ravages of
insects and mould that thrive in tropical climates. Thus, most of the works
that have reached us are those that travelled from the colonies where they were
produced back to the countries of origin or residence of their first owners.
This is likely to have been the path taken by the four pastels of Joseph
Savart, which bear a label from the house of Denis-Charles Buldet, a framer and
print dealer on the Rue de Gesvres in Paris, which proves that they were framed
there shortly after their creation.(4)

Officers, colonial administrators and
officials, wealthy colonial landowners who in the second half of the 18th
century preferred to entrust the management of their estates to a manager
rather than reside there, brought back these works to the mainland as souvenirs
at a moment in the history of taste that favoured exoticism. But what do these
works tell us about these distant lands and their social and economic fabric?
As it turns out, Joseph Savart’s depiction of Creole women is far more
significant and militant than it might appear at first glance.

From Champagne to the West Indies

The reasons that drove this son of a
bourgeois family to seek adventure in the French Caribbean, first in
Guadeloupe, then in Martinique, are unknown.5 He was born in 1735 in Reims,
Champagne. By 1765, he had settled in Basse-Terre, the capital of the Guadeloupe
colony, where he married the widow of a weaver, Miss Christine Elisabeth Rison.
In the baptismal certificate of their eldest son, Marie-Antoine, in 1768,
Joseph Savart is described as a “maître peintre” or master painter. This title,
at a time when artists and craftsmen were still organised in guilds, identifies
him as an experienced painter, practising his profession full-time and likely
taking on students. It is difficult to evaluate the volume of activity in his
workshop, and he probably had other sources of income. Nevertheless, the fact
that Savart chose godparents for his children among the colony’s notables
suggests a level of financial ease and social recognition.(6)

It is also significant that out of the five
works identified to date, Savart always signed and added the note ‘inv’ for
invenit after his signature. This Latin term, often followed by et pinxit,
highlights the artist’s creative input and the intellectual dimension of his
work. By claiming to have invented these drawings, Joseph Savart emphasises the
importance he places on his work as an artist and on the originality of his
compositions. Furthermore, the quality of his portraits of these Creole women
suggests that he specialised in portraiture. This more lucrative activity would
have allowed him to mingle with the elite. The 18th century represented a
golden age for portraiture, particularly for portraits drawn in pastel. Indeed,
it is because Savart chose to depict these four Creole women in portrait form
that he sets himself apart from his contemporaries like Augustin Brunias, who
painted lively scenes with a focus on the landscape, resorting to all the
clichés of exoticism.

Fig. 2 -
Marius-Pierre Le Masurier (1735-1801) ‘Famille de mulâtres’ (1775), Collection
Musée du quai Branly (inv.no. 75.1557 IA)

Fig. 2 -
Marius-Pierre Le Masurier (1735-1801) ‘Famille de mulâtres’ (1775), Collection
Musée du quai Branly (inv.no. 75.1557 IA)

Women’s wear: a symbol of vanity and a
social marker

Each of the four women is portrayed en
buste, with a close framing, their smiling gaze turned towards the viewer.
Their headdresses and light-coloured clothing stand out sharply against a dark
blue-black background. They bear an obvious resemblance to the four young women
in the pastel from the Schoelcher Museum (Fig. 1), who are depicted standing in
a trompe-l’oeil window frame, huddled together in a similarly friendly and
engaging attitude. They dazzle the viewer with their beauty and the discreet
coquetry of their light cotton and lace costumes, as well as with their
elaborate headdresses and jewellery. Each of them stands out due to the detail
of her attire and her skin colour, in a notable variation from light to dark.
Joseph Savart’s mastery of the pastel technique manifests in a very soft,
almost vaporous sketch. He brilliantly captured the materials and textures of
fabrics and ornaments, placing as much emphasis on these details as on the
figures’ faces. However, the pastel from the Schoelcher Museum is complex and
more narrating. Three young women each bear an accessory, an attribute of their
professions: the servant holds a meat dish, the seamstress or haberdasher poses
with her fabric swatches and ruler in the foreground, and behind her, a street vendor
carries a tray of small pies on her head. Without a landscape in the
background, the illusion of depth stems from the architectural trompe- l’oeil
set against a very bright blue background and the arrangement of the figures.
The pastel from the Schoelcher museum bears the inscription “1770. Joseph
Savart invenit et pinxit in Guadeloupa 17 November”.

The four pastels acquired by
Zebregs&Röell, which were drawn twenty months earlier, seem to be a
preparatory version ahead of the larger composition. The two works share the
importance given to the representation of clothing and the nuances in skin tone
reflective of Creole society. Finally, they bear an inscription by the same
hand that asserts they were made in Guadeloupe and when. Each of the four
pastels bears the same formula: ‘In Guadeloupe Savart invt 3 March 1769’, with
a different adjective each time, sic: ‘la Cabresse’, ‘la Mulatresse’, ‘la
Mestisse’ and ‘la Négresse’. This highly codified terminology illustrates how
colonial society was structured around the prejudice of colour.(7)

In the pastel from the Schoelcher Museum,
the composition, which seems to waver between a portrait and a genre scene, is
quite atypical. The artist appears to deviate from the usual codes of exoticism
in art and places great importance on the depiction of costumes. As it so
happens, this particular interest in costumes provides precious information in
order to understand the deeper meaning of this work. Clothing was indeed a very
important social marker in colonial society, as can be seen in the accounts of
travellers who visited the Caribbean in the 18th century. The garments worn by
Joseph Savart’s young women perfectly match the descriptions given by the
chroniclers and artists of the time. The headwear, which occupies significant
space in the composition of the Zebregs&Röell close-up bust portraits, is
one of the female accessories that struck travellers the most. Here, all the
women wear the bamboche, adorned with pins and flowers. This type of headwear
is a powerful marker: its height and the quality of its fabrics defined the
wearer’s social status. Besides, the young women have enhanced their outfits
with necklaces and earrings bearing typical Creole motifs. Jewellery made in
the Caribbean in the 18th century was an essential component of one’s appearance
and wealth. Made of gold, they constituted savings, patiently accumulated, bead
by bead, to form these grain-d’or necklaces, which, worn in multiple rows,
testified to a woman’s enrichment or sentimental ties.

In the colonial context of the 1760s-1780s,
however, clothing was not just a matter of fashion. It was also a tool, or even
a weapon, of social dominance. The clothes and accessories worn by the four
young women are very significant from this point of view. The taste for luxury
attributed to ‘mulattoes’ is a constant theme in accounts of the time,
particularly those written by Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry
(1750-1819). Hailing from a notable Creole family of Martinique, he represented
the colonial elite in action on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1796, he
published a ‘Topographical, Physical, Civil, Political, and Historical
Description of the French part of Saint-Domingue’ (Description topographique,
physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de Saint-
Domingue), in which he dwells at length on the lifestyle of the free people of
colour and in particular on the luxury favoured by the “mulattoes” and the
fashion trends they inspire:(8)

“The luxury of the mulattoes is taken to
the extreme, and since 1770, it has made progress that seems incredible to
those who have been able to compare the two periods. It is always in the cities
that one must observe it to form an exact idea. This luxury consists almost
entirely of one object, clothing. [...] Everything that India produces of the
most beautiful, the most precious in muslins, handkerchiefs, fabrics, and
linens, takes on the forms of fashion to embellish this coloured sex. Rich
laces, jewellery the multiplicity of which, rather than the genre, increases
the value, are used profusely [...]”(9)

Fig. 3 -
Marius-Pierre Le Masurier (1735-1801), Portrait de la famille Maximilien Claude
Joseph de Choiseul Meuse (1736-1816), à la Martinique, accompagné d’une
nourrice tenant un enfant dans ses bras (1775), Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux

Fig. 3 -
Marius-Pierre Le Masurier (1735-1801), Portrait de la famille Maximilien Claude
Joseph de Choiseul Meuse (1736-1816), à la Martinique, accompagné d’une
nourrice tenant un enfant dans ses bras (1775), Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux

A reaction against colour prejudice

This taste for clothing, which seems to be
characteristic of people of mixed descent in the colony, is not just vanity. It
reveals the violence inherent in a society where slavery was very much present,
with the appearance and spread of colour prejudice in the French colonies of
America in the 18th century. “Noirs”, “blancs”, “métisses” and “hommes libres
de couleur” (free people of colour): in the French Caribbean, on the eve of the
Revolution, men and women were designated by their skin colour, which defined
their legal status. The white population, statistically in the minority, was
now rivalled by the larger group of free people of colour. Therefore, the white
elites sought to confine the people of colour to an inferior

place by extending racial segregation.
Colour prejudice, which should not be confused with the later notion of
‘biological racism’, is the use of skin colour differences as a legitimisation
of a social order and hierarchy.

It was in this light that Moreau de
Saint-Méry, the spokesperson for the white colonial slavers, who perceived
themselves as belonging to an ‘aristocracy of the epidermis’, theorised colour
prejudice. To calculate the proportion of ‘black’ blood in an individual, he
created one-hundred- and-twenty-eight possible combinations of black-white
‘miscegenation’, hierarchised into nine categories: sacatra, griffe, marabout,
mulatto, quarteron, mestizo, mamelouk, quarteronné, and sang-melé. For the
mixed-descent population, this classification was very important. On the one
hand, it was recorded in civil registers and notarial deeds; on the other hand,
it established a hierarchy within which it was possible, from generation to
generation, to rise, but without ever being able to cross the ‘colour line’.
Indeed, “opinion [...] demands [...] that a line extended all the way to
infinity must always separate the white descent from the other [...]”. It is in
this context that we must place the inscriptions on the back of the four
pastels of Zebregs&Röell’s ‘la Capresse’, ‘la Mulâtresse’, ‘la Métis’ and
‘la Négresse’ (as transcribed in modern French). Since colour was marked with a
presumption of servitude, it results, as J.-L. Bonniol emphasises, that “the
fight against the ‘false free’ compels people of colour to have to prove their
freedom constantly”.(10) The sartorial excess observed among the freed and, in
general, the development of all outward signs of wealth thus may have been the
only way to mitigate the perverse effects of one’s status inherited from birth.

By showing us richly dressed women adorned
with jewellery, the iconography of Savart’s pastels thus tends to represent
free individuals. However, the language of clothing is not always so easy to
interpret. For example, Marius-Pierre Le Masurier, a French painter active in
Martinique around 1775, depicts in the foreground of his ‘Family of Mulattoes’
(Fig. 2) a richly adorned and well-dressed woman, undoubtedly free, who
nevertheless receives guests barefoot. In his ‘Portrait of the Duke of
Choiseul-Meuse and His Family’ (Fig. 3), Le Masurier depicts an enslaved
African woman (a ‘house-slave’) barefoot but very neatly dressed, with a
bamboche and adorned with jewellery, which, in another context, could indicate
her status as a free woman. Thus, the interpretation of these dress codes is
not straightforward. On the subject of ‘house-slaves’, Charles de l’Yver also
remarks: “[...] the young, or those who are comfortable, the maids, those who
serve inside the house, those in short who know how to make small profits,
compete in elegance with the free or kept women, who show them their
superiority by wearing shoes.”(11)

A policital artwork

The distinctiveness of Savart’s pastels
lies in his way of depicting these young women. They appear to us as unique
individuals, following the codes of portraiture, whereas Savart’s
contemporaries, like Augustin Brunias, favour

the more generic setting of the genre
scene. In the British islands of the Caribbean, Brunias painted the successes
of his patron, the administrator of Dominica, and worked for the white
planters, for whom he created small genre scenes depicting colonial society in
a flattering light. Brunias was committed to representing different phenotypes,
but unlike Savart, he illustrated a social hierarchy. Thus, in the painting
from the Thyssen collection (Fig. 4), the woman with the ‘darkest’ skin tone is
in service, while the woman with the ‘lightest’ skin tone is the most richly
dressed, and the woman of mixed descent occupies an intermediate position. For
Brunias, it was important to show the differences, to lift the ambiguities,
whereas in the reality of colonial life, dress was used to blur the lines.

However, throughout the 18th century,
colonial authorities tried to re-establish this hierarchy of fashion and
clothing by regulating their use with sumptuary laws. An initial

text from 1720 thus forbade free people of
colour from wearing certain fabrics, notably lace, and gold jewellery. As it
was difficult to implement, it was then bolstered by three ordinances in 1754,
1765, and 1809. The ordinance of July 30, 1765, almost contemporary with
Savart’s pastels, stipulates in its article 3:

“That all mulattos, Indians or freed
Negroes or others, free by birth, of any sex, may dress in gingham cloth,
cotton, calico or other equivalent fabrics of little value, with similar
garments on top, without silk, gilding, or lace, hats, shoes and simple
hairstyles, under penalty of prison and confiscation of their clothes
[...]”.(12)

The accounts of chroniclers, like Savart’s
pastels, demonstrate the inefficiency of these laws. But Savart went even
further by having the woman with the darkest skin wear the most precious
clothing adorned with rich lace and the finest gold jewellery. Considering the
law at the time, this was a real provocation. Another significant feature of
Savart’s pastels is that they represent these women for themselves, as who they
were. No painterly artifice distracts us: the backgrounds are neutral, and all
the focus is on these individuals. In the Schoelcher Museum pastel, the young
women are depicted with the attributes of their activities. Although modest,
these small traits celebrated the success of a new social class, that of free
interpreneurs of colour, and even more so that of women. Whether they were, as
in Savart’s work, a haberdasher or street vendor or at the head of a small
business producing sugar or coffee, colonial society allowed these free women
of colour the possibility to exist and live independently of men.(13)

Clothing and racial classification thus
played a role in ethical and political dynamics, and they fed the arguments
exchanged between opponents and supporters of the racist legal order based on
slavery. In Savart’s era, these debates stirred colonial society and laid the
ideological foundations leading to the revolutionary legislation that abolished
slavery and segregation. By drawing these Creole women, Joseph Savart
participated in this debate. This commitment was also reflected in his life as
a man and as a citizen. In 1792, Savart, now settled in Martinique, exiled
himself and his family to Dominica, then French. Like other residents of Saint
Pierre (the so-called patriot Pierrotins), he fled the domination of
counterrevolutionaries who rebelled against the central power in Martinique and
Guadeloupe.(14) Along with other exiled Republicans, he took part in the
election of the deputies of the Windward Islands to the National Convention.
“Savart father, Savart son [and] Savart junior” thus participated in the first
male universal suffrage vote in the history of France.15 His son Antoine, who
embarked on a military career at the age of sixteen, shared the same ideas. As
a lieutenant du Génie, he actively participated in the struggle that opposed
the French revolutionary army to the British and the
counterrevolutionaries.(16)

This Republican and abolitionist commitment
of Joseph Savart and his sons, quite remarkable in the white Antillean society
they belonged to, sheds light on the deeper meaning of these pastels of women
of colour. Distinguishing himself from the pleasant genre scenes of his
contemporaries such as Brunias and Le Masurier, Savart depicts these women of
colour on an equal footing with white women. This was achieved by the depiction
of elaborate costumes and the artifices of portraiture. The women are dignified,
free, and independent - some fifteen years before the first abolition of
slavery. Aware of their differences and simultaneously united as sisters, they
embody an ideal, that of the union of free citizens and the promise of equality
for all people.

Fig. 4) Augustin Brunias (1730-1796), Women
and a servant (c. 1770-1780), Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Fig. 4) Augustin Brunias (1730-1796), Women
and a servant (c. 1770-1780), Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

(Ed.) In this essay, the term Creole is
used for people of mixed descent, but always with white European ancestors.

1 Séverine
Laborie, “Joseph Savart, maître peintre à Basse-Terre” in: Revue des Musées de
France, February 2012-1; Séverine Laborie, “Joseph Savart (1735-1801), maître
peintre à Basse-Terre” in: Bulletin de la Société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe,
no. 163, September-December 2012, pp. 1-16; Séverine Laborie, “Les quatre
femmes créoles de Joseph Savart: la représentation d’une société coloniale
complexe” in: Un Monde créole, vivre aux Antilles au XVIIIe siècle, La Crèche,
éditions La Geste, 2017, pp. 62-71

2 One must mention, for the University of
the French Antilles and Guiana, the pioneering work conducted by Danielle
Bégot, continued today by Christelle Lozère.

3 Danielle
Bégot, “L’expression plastique dans les Antilles du XVIIIe siècle aux années
1870”, in: Anthologie de la peinture en Guadeloupe des origines à nos jours,
Conseil régional de Guadeloupe / HC Editions, Paris, 2009, p. 40-53.

4 Denis-Charles Buldet’s shop, “Au grand
coeur”, disappeared in 1777. (Saulnier Duchartre, Bénézit. - Dictionary of
print publishers, occ. 1758)

5 A few genealogical details may be found
in several articles of the Bulletin of the Genealogy and History Association of
the Caribbean, dedicated more specifically to the life of Joseph Savart’s son,
Antoine (see: Généalogie et Histoire de la Caraïbe, no. 40, pp. 620-621, 91-
68, p. 349, 91-97, p. 377, 92-2 p. 494).

6 The godfather, “Sir Antoine Pelletier de
Lyancourt, knight, reformed captain of the bombardiers”, is the Lord of the
viscounty of Villers- Hélon, an artillery officer and Knight of Saint-Louis.
The godmother is “Lady Marie Jeanne Debury, wife of Sir Esquire Dutocq de
Quesnel”.

7 (Ed.) These terms that aren’t in use
anymore, but explained here, respectively: ‘capresse’ or ‘squadroon’ is someone
who is of mixed (of which a quarter of black African) descent; ‘mulatto’ is
someone of mixed European and black African descent; and ‘mestizo’ is someone
of mixed indigenous and white European descent.

8 clear sign of the assertion of the Creole
costume, its flexible and comfortable forms were adopted by white Creoles who
wore a tied madras headscarf and even made their way to the mainland around
1778-1779, with the chemise dresses that Marie-Antoinette herself would promote
at the Court of Versailles.

9
Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819), Description topographique,
physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle
Saint-Domingue..., ed. 2, vol. 1, Paris, T. Morgand, 1875. (Gallica
http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ cb36491843g)

10 Jean-Luc
Bonniol, La couleur comme maléfice: une illustration créole de la généalogie
des Blancs et des Noirs, Paris, 1992, p. 56

11 Lettres
de Charles de l’Yver, op. cit.

12 Letters
of Charles de l’Yver, op. cit.

13 Marie
Hardy, “La Martinique des mornes” étdude sociale des caféiers au XVIIIe siècle”
in: Un Monde Créole, vivre aux Antilles au XVIIIe siècle, La Crèche, La Geste,
2017, pp. 81-88

14 The reason why Joseph Savart and his
family left Guadeloupe between 1771 and 1779 to live in Saint-Pierre in
Martinique is unknown.

15 285 “true Republicans” met in Roseau
(Dominica) on October 28, 1792, “the fourth year of the French regeneration.”
All declared having been “forced to leave their property and families because
they refused to take up arms to repel the French station and to display the
sign of revolt.” Believing themselves to be “the only ones faithful to the
metropole,” they were, therefore, the only ones with the right to elect
deputies to the Convention. These deliberations and votes were recorded at the
Convention on September 15, 1793. (Source: Paris, National Archives no. AN C//181/86). See the remarkable
article by Bernadette & Philippe Rossignol: “La Dominique refuge des
pierrotins patriotes” in: Généalogie et Histoire de la Caraïbe, no. 226, June
2006, pp. 28- 29, as well as that of Pierre Bardin, “À la Dominique, 1792: Les
électeurs des députés a la Convention” in: Généalogie et Histoire de la
Caraïbe, no. 226, June 2006, Paris, pp. 31-37.

16 He participated as a lieutenant of the
Engineers (lieutenant du Génie) in the
two sieges of Martinique against the British, in 1793 and 1794. After a period
of captivity, he continued his action in Guadeloupe alongside Victor Hugues,
sent by the Convention to drive out the British and abolish slavery (*Campagne
de Brumaire*, An III, October/November 1794).