Belley was a Senegalese, born at Goree about 1747 and enslaved in St. Domingue. Later he was in the French army and in 1793 became a representative of St. Domingue to the French government, a position he continued to hold for several years. For details on Belley and this painting, which is located at the Musèe National des Chateaux de Versailles, France (which also issues it as a colored postcard), see Honour, Image of the Black, pp. 104 ff, and Laurent Dubois, Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 66-68.

Painted by Anne-Louis Girodet (1767-1824) and published in Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art (Menil Foundation, Harvard University Press, 1989), vol. 4, pt. 1, p. 104, fig. 55.

Girodet, Anne-Louise

English

Image is in the public domain. Metadata is available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.

NW0225

Caribbean--St. Domingue

"Jean-Baptiste Belley, Saint Domingue (Haiti), 1797 or 1798", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed January 26, 2021, http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1476