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This record was last updated on 03 May 2012
Pierre Jacques Benoit, Voyage a Surinam . . . cent dessins pris sur nature par l'auteur (Bruxelles, 1839), plate viii, fig.15. (Copy in the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)
Three enslaved women and a girl in the foreground. Benoit writes that their feet are bare because only free people of color "have the right to wear shoes" (p. 21). The civil and military hospital is in the background. Sick people are transported to the hospital "in a type of box covered by canvas" (p. 17). Benoit (1782-1854), a Belgian artist, visited Suriname around 1831 and apparently stayed for several months. The 100 lithographs in his book (hand colored in the John Carter Brown copy), accompanied by textual descriptions of varying detail, are derived from drawings he made during his visit, which included time in Paramaribo, the capital, as well as trips into the interior visiting Maroons and Amerindians. Forty of his lithographs, with our translations from the French text, are shown on this website.