The Artist: Born in Avallon, Burgundy, Antoine Vestier studied in Paris with the history painter Jean-Baptiste Pierre (1714–1789). From the late 1750s, he is recorded as a portraitist in pastel and miniature. Admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture as a student in 1781, he first exhibited at the Académie’s official Salon in 1785 with six portraits. In 1786, supported by the leading portraitist Joseph Siffred Duplessis (1725–1802), Vestier became a full member of the Académie and exhibited The Met’s portrait among others at the following year’s Salon. Oil painting never fully supplanted Vestier’s popularity as a miniature painter, a practice that seems to have been a key source of income. This said, Vestier’s oil paintings of the 1780s and 1790s are among the most innovative portraits of his time.[1] These include his remarkable portrait of the Chevalier Jean Henri de Latude (1789; Musée Carnavalet, Paris) depicted against the backdrop of the Bastille and a series of portraits of his daughter, Marie Nicole Vestier (1767–1846), who was also a painter.
The Sitter: The son of the Intendant Général des Finances of France, Foullon d’Ecotier began his career in 1772 as Conseiller au Châtelet in Paris. In 1785, Louis XVI appointed him Intendant of Guadeloupe and its dependencies, a role subordinate to the governor and ultimately to the navy through the Ministère de la Marine. Foullon d’Ecotier was in Guadeloupe continuously from 1785 to 1791, except for a brief period in 1786, when he became interim Intendant of Martinique. In 1789 a revolution broke out in Guadeloupe in reaction to the one taking place in France. Foullon d’Ecotier, joining the patriots rather than the landowners, was forced to give up his position. The same year, back in Paris, his father and brother-in-law were both executed by the Revolutionary government. He returned to France in 1791, spent eighteen months in jail during the Terror, and after repeated requests finally returned to Guadeloupe as Intendant in 1816 under Louis XVIII. In September 1817, however, he was recalled for misappropriation of tax funds. Pleading with the Ministère de la Marine for retirement pay, he was awarded a pension by order of the king in July 1820 and, posthumously, the Cross of Saint Louis in January 1822.
The Portrait and Its Context: This portrait was painted in 1785, between the sitter's appointment as Intendant of Guadeloupe in June and his departure to assume his post in November. A book with the title
Ordonnances de la Marine running across its spine seen on the shelf would have contained regulations for administering French colonies. A nearby pamphlet titled
Mémoire may represent a copy of the report given to the baron Clugny when he was named governor of Guadeloupe; dated March 20, 1784, it carried instructions for the administration of Guadeloupe and its dependent islands. The map, copied from that published by Jacques-Nicolas Bellin (1703–1772) in 1759 (see fig. 5 above), represents the territory under Foullon d’Ecotier’s jurisdiction: Guadeloupe, Marie Galante, and the cluster of tiny islands called Les Isles des Saintes. Vestier faithfully copied its cartouche, reproducing every detail except the Roman numerals of the date, for which he substituted his own name and the date of the portrait.
The documents cited in Vestier’s portrait were tools in the colonial exploitation of Guadeloupe and the tens of thousands of enslaved individuals brought from Africa to the island as part of the Triangular Trade. The Ordonnances de la Marine was first issued in 1681, emerging from the same context of the Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s infamous
Code Noir (1685), an explicitly racist text that justified and even outlined modes of torture for maintaining power over enslaved individuals throughout the French colonies. As Jean-François Niort has argued, the applicability of the
Code Noir varied considerably in local contexts, but in Guadeloupe an ordonnance of 1783 explicitly reiterated its tenants.[2]
By the time of the French Revolution, only a few years into Foullon d’Ecotier’s post in Guadeloupe, violent forced immigration had resulted in an enslaved African-descended population of some eighty-six thousand individuals on the island, a free Black and Creole population of around five thousand, and an administrative, land-owning class of white families numbering around eleven thousand. Enslaved and free Black individuals on Guadeloupe played a key role in the attempts at revolution on the island in 1789, echoing those taking place in mainland France. Rebellion had been rare on the island since 1773 and between the years 1789 and 1792, Foullon d’Ecotier’s superior, the governor Clugny, was preoccupied with maintaining a racist social order couched in paternalistic language that propagated the theory that on Guadeloupe, “the slaves are very submissive, and they have given no indications that might raise fears of an insurrection . . . Besides, all the slave owners live here in the midst of them . . . and they are treated less as despots than as brothers.”[3] Details of Foullon de’Ecotier’s engagement with the slave trade are unclear, but are the subject of ongoing research; at the very least, it is obvious that the very nature of his administrative post relied on perpetuating slavery in the French Carribean.
Although the French Revolution provided a brief moment of hope for the freedom of enslaved people on the island of Guadeloupe, slavery was quickly reinstated and would not finally be abolished in the French Caribbean until 1848. Guadeloupe became a
département, or territory, of France in 1946, though it remains under French control. In 2015, the Mémorial ACTe (Centre caribéen d’expressions et de mémoire de la Traite et de l’Esclavage) opened with the aim of remembering the enslaved individuals who had labored on the island, where the legacies of that history remain deeply embedded.
For more on the relationship between French painting, French colonial administration, and enslaved labor in French territories, see related entries on Pierre Louis Dumesnil the Younger (
1976.100.8) and Nicolas de Largillierre (
03.37.2) as well as Katharine Baetjer’s
“Finding Context for a 17th-Century Enslaved Servant in a Painting by Largillierre."David Pullins 2021
[1] See Anne-Marie Passez,
Antoine Vestier, Paris, 1989.
[2] Jean-François Niort, "De l’ordonnance royale de mars 1685 à l’ordonnance locale sur la police Générale des Nègres de décembre 1783: remarques sure le ‘Code Noir’ et son évolution juridique aux Iles françaises du Vent sous l’Ancien Régime,"
Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, no. 173 (January–April 2016), pp. 37–52.
[3] Frédéric Régent, "Révoltes, factions, categories juridiques et sociales en Guadeloupe (1789–1794),"
Cahiers d’histoire. Revue d’histoire critique, no. 94–95 (2005), pp. 87–99.
