REVOLTE A ST. DOMINGUE : HAND-COLORED ENGRAVING DEPICTING A SLAVE UPRISING, AFTER FOUQUIER, ENGRAVED BY GIRARDET This is a small hand-colored engraving titled "Revolte a St. Domingue" (Revolt in Saint-Domingue), depicting a dramatic nighttime scene of an armed uprising among enslaved people. The composition shows a crowd of figures wielding torches and weapons amid burning buildings, with several figures shown mid-action in the foreground, including two seated figures huddled together in the lower left. The print is signed in the plate "Fouquier Del." and "Girardet Sc." This type of small-format, hand-colored engraving was typical of the illustrated travel, geography, and history volumes published in France in the early-to-mid 19th century, which frequently included dramatic scenes from European colonial history, including depictions of slave revolts and resistance in the Americas. Unframed. Plate: 4.25 x 6.75 inches; sheet: 7 x 10.25 inches $120-160
NOTE: Saint-Domingue was a French colony occupying the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, corresponding roughly to present-day Haiti. It existed from 1659 to 1803. Its name came from Santo Domingo, the main Spanish city on the island, which eventually became specific to the Spanish colony known as the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo; the territory that is now the Dominican Republic. For much of their history, the borders between the French and Spanish sides of the island were not fixed and shifted repeatedly, only becoming permanent after the Dominican War of Independence in 1844.
