Discover Top Posts Tagged with #sugar mill

Source details and larger version.

Spinning through time: vintage windmills.

#sugar mill #windmill #1920s #west indies #vintage illustration #illustration

Miles Kane at Sugar Mill, Stoke-on-Trent - 06.08.2023

(credits)

#miles kane #mk5 #one man band tour #omb tour #sugar mill #he looks so beautiful!!#last pic :o #forgot one pic!

#Jamalpur #machinery #earth tones #earth colors #sugar mill

This engraving titled A Tread-Mill Scene in Jamaica (also published in a variant version titled An Interior View of Jamaican House of Correction) played an important role in the abolitionist campaign against the apprenticeship system. Apprenticeship — planned as a six-year transitional system and in the end lasting only four years — was introduced in Jamaica in 1834.

It renamed enslaved people as “apprentices” and compelled them to work for those who had formerly been their owners. Although apprenticeship was initially accepted by most British antislavery campaigners as a gradual means of ending slavery, the conflicts and violence that accompanied it eventually convinced these abolitionists to campaign for its end.

Because apprentice-holders, unlike slaveholders, were not legally permitted to use direct physical violence as a means of control, apprenticeship saw an increase in the use of the prison system as a form of labor discipline. Many of the most serious and widely publicized abuses during apprenticeship took place in Jamaican prisons. This abolitionist print, which illustrated a shocking first-person account, A Narrative of Events . . . , by James Williams, a former apprentice, attempts to capture them all.

At the center of the image is a treadmill. Treadmills were introduced into most Jamaican prisons during apprenticeship as a supposedly humane form of punishment. As this abolitionist exposé emphasizes, they soon became sites of torture. Prisoners were supposed to step regularly upward, several inches at a time, turning the wheel as they did so. In practice, the wheel often turned so fast that those “working” it had no chance of maintaining their footing, and so slipped off, hanging by wrists strapped to a bar above the wheel as the wheel turned and its steps repeatedly struck their legs.

Prison drivers flogged those who came off the wheel and sometimes those who had not, in an attempt to force them to continue to step or to refind their footing if they had fallen off. The whip added to the pain inflicted by the punishment.

#jamaican treadmill #jamaica #slavery #colonial slavery tools #sugar mill #Black Life during slavery in Jamaica #victorian jamaica #Tread Mill

In 1885 the Barcelona-based José Gallart Forgas commissioned Francisco Oller, who was of Spanish descent himself, to paint his five sugar mills, or ingenios, though this is the only one Oller completed. While the sparse landscape includes relatively few laborers, partly a result of Puerto Rico’s abolition of slavery nearly twelve years earlier, this scene is one of technological progress and efficiency, featuring a steam-operated mill at right and a cart track at left.

Among the most celebrated Caribbean painters in the nineteenth century, Oller spent a number of years living and studying in Paris. There he absorbed and reconfigured the radical styles of Realism, with its democratic approach to everyday subject matter, and Impressionism, with its emphasis on spontaneous and momentary effects of light and atmosphere. Together these movements helped Oller form a unique artistic vision of his native Puerto Rico (then a Spanish colony), emphasizing its local plants, landscapes, traditions, and sugar production, the mainstay of the island’s economy.

See this work of Oller’s as part of Monet to Morisot: The Real and Imagined in European Art on the fifth floor.

🎨 Francisco Oller (Puerto Rican, 1833-1917). Hacienda La Fortuna, 1885. Oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Lilla Brown in memory of her husband, John W. Brown, by exchange, 2012.19 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)