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This is the earliest known painting of Barbados, which was colonized by the British in 1627 to exploit its resources for financial gain. When this image was painted, sugar was the island’s primary cash crop. The artist depicts the processes of the sugar industry, which fueled an explosion of wealth for white planters, traders, and colonial officials at the expense of African and Indigenous lives and freedom. Beyond the coastal settlements, the sugarcane grows in fields while the enslaved workers bundle it and carry it away for processing at the mill on the shore to the right of the fort. Nearby, white workers prepare to load the sugar onto the heavily armed merchant ships that will transport it to Britain and its New England colonies for further processing and trade.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2025

Spanish explorers discovered Barbados in the early sixteenth century but showed little interest in exploiting the island. In 1625, British merchant adventurers seized Barbados from Spain and had begun cultivating the island with sugar plantations by the 1640s. Finding sugar production a labor-intensive process, and with no large population of native Caribs to put to work, British planters imported African slaves to toil in the fields and mills. Over twenty-six thousand slaves were transported from West Africa to Barbados in the twenty years before Sailmaker made this painting; and slave labor turned the island into the most profitable British colony in the seventeenth century. Sailmaker, a Dutch painter who settled in England, represents the British and Dutch merchant vessels that shipped slaves to Barbados and sugar back to European markets. He never visited the West Indies and based this painting entirely on maps and plans.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016

In this, the earliest known European painting of Barbados, the island's geography is intricately bound to its cash crop. Barbados was an important sugar-producing British colony entirely dependent upon slave labor. The windmills dotting the interior of the island and the mill worked by slaves near the coast to the right represent stages in the refining process. The refined sugar was exported on board English and Dutch ships sailing from Bridgetown (in the foreground). Isaac Sailmaker was the last surviver of a glorious generation of Dutch émigrés who in the 1670s introduced marine painting to England. While Sailmaker never visited Barbados, he gleaned information from maps and published descriptions (some more reliable than others), and possibly even consulted sketches made on the spot by sailors.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2005