Central & Caribbean

Central America and the Caribbean occupied a central place in the European imagination from the moment of Columbus’s first landfall in 1492. The islands of the Caribbean — Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, the Lesser Antilles — were the first New World territories to be colonised by European powers, and they generated an extraordinarily rich body of visual documentation as successive waves of Spanish, English, French and Dutch colonists sought to record, exploit and understand the lands they had seized. The antique prints in this collection reflect that long tradition of documentary and promotional imagery, spanning five centuries of European engagement with the region.

The earliest printed images of the Caribbean and Central America derived from the accounts of explorers and colonists — Oviedo, Benzoni, de Bry — whose illustrated narratives introduced European readers to the landscapes, peoples and natural history of the New World. Theodore de Bry’s great series of America volumes, published from 1590 onwards, contained engraved images of Caribbean and Central American subjects that circulated widely and shaped European understanding of the region for generations. These early images are as much works of the imagination as faithful documentary records, but they are primary evidence for how the New World was perceived and represented at a crucial moment in the history of European expansion.

The plantation economies of the Caribbean generated their own illustrative tradition. Sugar, tobacco, indigo and coffee cultivation — and the enslaved labour on which they depended — were depicted in prints that combined promotional intent with documentary detail. Views of plantations, illustrations of agricultural processes and images of the social world of the colonial Caribbean appear in travel accounts, agricultural manuals and promotional publications across the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, providing a visual record of the economic and human realities of colonial production that is as uncomfortable as it is historically indispensable.

Natural history illustration drew heavily on Central American and Caribbean subjects. The extraordinary biodiversity of the region — its birds, reptiles, insects and plants — attracted naturalists from the earliest years of European settlement, and the illustrations produced from their collections and observations are among the finest achievements of natural history publishing. Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705), based on direct observation in Suriname, set a standard for combined botanical and entomological illustration that influenced the tradition for a century.

Topographical views of Caribbean cities and landscapes — Havana, Kingston, Port Royal, Bridgetown, Cartagena — appear in the major European travel publications of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, recording the built environment and physical character of colonial settlements at specific historical moments. These images are of particular interest to historians of urban development and colonial architecture, as well as to collectors with connections to specific islands or territories.

For collectors, antique prints of Central America and the Caribbean offer material of considerable variety and genuine rarity. The combination of natural history interest, colonial history, topographical documentation and the visual appeal of tropical landscapes gives this area an unusual breadth, and significant original examples are increasingly difficult to find.