French Colonial Portraiture of a Slave Woman

Beautiful piece with a woman wearing the typical tignon associated with slave women in the Caribbean and Louisiana. One site on Haitian culture uses the painting as an example of portraiture of a "Haitian" or Saint-Dominguan woman in the 18th century. Some refer to the piece as Portrait of a Haitian Woman or Portrait d'une femme haïtienne by François Malépart de Beaucourt in 1786. Regardless of her exact origins in France's vast 18th century colonial empire, images like these of enslaved people are fascinating from a personal and historical perspective.