17/11/2025
Sometime in the 1850s an unknown artist created a portrait of a Eurafrican women who was possibly a Dona, Nhara, Signare or a Caribbean/Louisianan ‘Mulata’. This bust and shoulders portrait is a side profile from the right cheek in felt, cotton and silk on a tawny gold velvet and with a tipped on nineteenth-century and hand-painted glass eye, the hair and eyebrow possibly in black wool, lips coloured and texture stitched out in red thread and teeth in white thread. The mauve turban possibly has a point which has been folded into the head covering. The subject wears a brass earring and a ‘necklace’ composed of brass wire circles stitched to the neckline of a blouse in possibly pale gold silk fabric and terminating in three pierced gold coins of some vintage that are hammered with Arabic letters.
A striking image of a Eurafrican or a woman with African descendants, that, in its style and use of materials suggests finery with luxurious fabrics and gold jewellery and that has an expensive, probably hand-painted, glass eye and other more everyday materials from far and wide.
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries African Donas, Nharas and Signares were strata of high status and at times even truly elite women. They were often Métis (mixed race) that is of European and African descent, or first generation, Africans who through “mariage à la mode du pays” formed partnerships with white colonials of a maritime or military background, often the so-called ‘lancados’ or the ‘chucked out’, some of whom were Jews and others who were Christians who were fleeing the Spanish Inquisition.
DM for more.
