Augustus Earle’s Negroes fighting, Brazils

The setting was the Campo de Santana, where another contemporary artist, Frenchman Jean-Baptist Debret, had portrayed the enslaved being publicly flogged. Yet what Earle turns his attention to here is not the spectacle of punishment, but to unabashed revelry. In 1808 a British merchant had described the Campo de Santana thus:

theatre of revelry and din. Here was the native of Mosambique, and Quilumana, of Cabinda, Luanda, Benguela, and Angola. . . . You might see the cheeks of an athlete of Angola ready to crack under the exertion of producing a hideous sound from a calabash, while another performer dealt blows so thick and heavy on his kettledrum, that only the impervious nature of a bullock’s hide could resist them. . . . every looker-on participated in the sibylline spirit which animated the dancers and musicians; the welkin rang with the wild enthusiasm of the negro clans. (Robertson, p. 166-67).

In Earle’s painting, a central male dancer’s raised arms might indeed suggest the influence of the Iberian fandango, to accord with the work’s title, although it is more likely that the dance was the batuque, a forerunner of the modern samba, which was widely practiced by the enslaved in Brazil from the seventeenth century onwards. Scholars have highlighted the extraordinary transcultural hybridity of such Afro-Brazilian dances, particularly if one considers the original Moorish and gypsy influences on the fandango (Chasteen, pp. 33-35).

The overt sexuality of such dances was not the only aspect that troubled European spectators: so too was the sense of rebellion that such gatherings signified. From at least 1817 the city authorities had begun restricting the large congregation of enslaved people as they were seen as disturbing the public order, and by the time Earle was living in Rio de Janeiro batuque dancers were frequently being arrested. (Assunção 2005, p. 40; pp. 75–90). Metropolitan and plantocratic fears of insurrection lay behind the increased curtailment of such gatherings, particularly after the 1804 triumph of Haiti’s enslaved. Little wonder then, almost out of sight on the far right, the artist included the quietly reassuring figure of a soldier overseeing the festivities, his long sword clearly visible. In acknowledging that it was necessary pictorially to defuse the potential threat contained in his image, Earle also included an unaccompanied European woman and her small child. Such figures function as markers of social cohesion, recognisable symbols of an apparently harmonious multi-racial society whose natural hierarchies are under no threat. The presence of the soldier is a subtle reminder that what appear to be scenes of unabashed communal joy are in fact underpinned by anxious surveillance. Earle reminds us of enslavement’s coercive and violent underpinnings. His tendency to fill his compositions with an array of what might be considered extraneous detail was not only a sign of empirical diligence, but also a means of persuading viewers of his authority as an eyewitness.