Slavery and the Romantic sketch: Jean Baptiste Debret’s visual poetics of trauma

This paper is focused on a variety of works, made by Jean-Baptiste Debret in Rio de Janeiro in the 1820s, which describe slave life. It is argued that Debret committed himself imaginatively to responding to Brazilian slavery with an honesty of vision and a precision of form that allowed him to produce an artistic commentary on slave trauma unique in its emotional depth and formal range. As the work focussed upon Brazilian slavery, and until recently was almost completely buried in inaccessible archives, it has not been given the attention within studies of slavery, diaspora and Romanticism which it demands and merits.