Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, Deputy for Saint-Domingue

Saint-Domingue is a colony, not a saint

The word saint in this title belongs to a place. Saint-Domingue was the French name for the colony on the western part of Hispaniola, and it reaches the picture the way half of French geography reaches a canvas — as an address, not as a figure in the calendar. Nothing devotional is at stake. The record files the work under portraiture, male, and cultural heritage, with no religious category at all.

Why the entry is here

This catalogue collects the works whose titles contain the word saint, and it keeps the toponyms rather than quietly deleting them, because a reader looking for one may land on the other. Saying plainly which is which is more useful than an absence.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the portrait to 1798 and gives the Château de Versailles, Versailles, France as its location. No dimensions are recorded in this entry. The style is given as Romanticism and the nationality as French; the measured colour family is ochre. The title also records an office — deputy for the colony named in it — which is the kind of fact a portrait title carries when the sitter's public role is the reason the picture exists. What that role involved is not something this entry records, and nothing is claimed for it here.