Brooklyn Museum Analysis

The Brooklyn Museum’s view of the portrait shows eighteenth-century mixed-race colonial elite of the island of Dominica in the West Indies. When first seeing this painting you can see the fine detail of how it was painted. Brunias was sure to pay attention to detail of clothings and face and yet still keep in mind the body language in which everyone was protrayed. The two women are shown accompanied by their mother and their children, along with eight African servants, as they walk on the grounds of a sugar plantation, one of the agricultural estates that were Dominica's chief source of wealth . Brunias documented colonial women of color as privileged and prosperous. The two wealthy sisters are distinguished from their mother and servants
The painting includes figures who would have been expected by viewers to be slaves which are painted as the darker skinned men and women dancings with others of higher social status who might be free women of color which are the womens who are painted as the lighter–skinned women wearing more European-style costumes. The clothing’s style painted also show the combined European and African elements with turbans and headwraps in combination with corsets and shirts, and all the figures barefoot. This is important to notice because of the European clothing which showed that they had money but also was a key in identifly they afriacan or caribban tradition of head wrappingsThe small band which looks the pre-Lent carnival traditionally known as a Masquerade or Mas’ which is still performed in Dominica.
As with other images of life in the British West Indies by Brunias the major economic reason for colonization and the creation of slave plantations in the Caribbean they did have the production of sugar and coffee we can see the windmill and plantation buildings in the distance that the land was being worked