Transmission and Transfer: Plantation Imagery and Medical Management in the British Empire

This essay centralizes representations of the Caribbean plantation in British art, and examines their importance to the development of landscape representation and the history of medicine. The plantation came into view through the overlapping conventions of the picturesque genre and colonial medicine. Tracing their relationship to, and distancing from, the development of British art ‘at home’, I address how these visual economies – connecting art and medicine – can challenge our conception of the ‘global’ nature of British art. This essay also considers what these terms – global/colonial/British – mean as we grapple with the legacy of these imperial histories by examining the work of contemporary artists Ingrid Pollard and Annalee Davis who conceive of, and visualize, alternative histories of relation.