A Place to Call Home? : Isaac Mendes Belisario’s Depictions of Land and Space

• In Event: Visual Arts

Abstract

This paper explores how the Jamaican artist of Sephardic descent, Isaac Mendes Belisario (1795-1849), used the genre of landscape painting to negotiate Jewish identity. Art historians have acknowledged Belisario’s minoritarian status. However, they have yet to seriously consider his Jewishness as an integral component of his artworks. Debates largely center on Belisario’s opinions about enslavement and how white (Christian) society as a whole interpreted his representations of Black figures. While reducing Belisario’s Jewishness to a biographic detail and overlooking the rich histories of Jewish Jamaicans, these conversations neglect the ways his artworks engaged with Jewish Jamaicans’ struggles to situate themselves in a plantation-based society.

Jewish as well as non-Jewish audiences likely interpreted Belisario’s View of Kelley’s Estate (1840) and Coco Walk (1840) in relationship to the recent ending of enslavement and apprenticeship. Evoking an apprehensive attitude about a free society, trees are overgrown, mountains obscure plantations, and Black figures maintain agentive presences. But the specific anxieties of Jewish Jamaicans cannot be conflated with the anxieties of white Christian planters or even with people of color who enjoyed free status before the emancipation period. Jewish Jamaicans, including Belisario’s own family, were caught up in a contradictory web where integration into Jamaican society hinged on the plantation economy. Since the 1290 Edict of Expulsion, Jews were readmitted to British society based on their perceived economic utility towards imperial interests. Jewish migrants became merchants and plantation owners through this apparent usefulness. Service to England also became the grounds for granting political rights to Jewish Jamaicans in 1831. This raised serious questions about what emancipation meant for those whose sovereignty was based on the plantation economy. Considering this historical context, I ultimately argue that Belisario’s pictures of Kelley’s Estate and Coco Walk functioned as mediations of Jewish Jamaican’s uncertain future. The first Jewish member of the House of Assembly of Jamaica began managing both estates in 1838 (the same year apprenticeship ended). Ultimately, Belisario’s paintings are a crucial case study about the particular function of landscape representation in Jewish visual culture.

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Author

• Michael Feinberg