Visions of violence in the Haitian Revolution

The images of the Haitian Revolution attributed to French painter Jean-Louis Boquet and British soldier Marcus Rainsford have been widely used by museums and historians as eyewitness depictions of key atrocities. Exploring the images and texts produced by these two artists reveals that it is highly unlikely that either was produced in situ in Saint Domingue. Both Boquet and Rainsford drew heavily on a pre-revolutionary visual corpus of landscapes and adventurer's narratives as they experimented with differing visions of slave rebellion and military invasion. This article emphasises the extent to which their finished works were commercial objects, produced at specific political conjunctures in France and Britain, and in response to public opinion and market calculation. Recognising the dynamics of reproduction and omission that shaped their representations of inter-racial violence in Haiti reveals how knowledge of the revolution was constructed as legitimate. Their evasion of slave violence was not simply because black agency was unthinkable, but rather that visual evidence was not seen as necessary to authenticate the savagery of the enslaved.