You prob­a­bly know his pic­tures, though you may not know his name. Richard Brid­gens' draw­ings are used con­stant­ly to il­lus­trate slav­ery in the Caribbean in ex­hi­bi­tions, books and films. But who was he, and do his pic­tures of en­slaved peo­ple ac­cu­rate­ly de­pict their lives?

Brid­gens had an ar­tis­ti­cal­ly in­flu­en­tial–though not fi­nan­cial­ly suc­cess­ful–ca­reer as a fur­ni­ture de­sign­er in Re­gency Eng­land. But in 1826 he and his fam­i­ly sailed for Trinidad, where his wife owned part of a sug­ar es­tate in Arou­ca.

Here Brid­gens drew what he saw around him, in par­tic­u­lar the cy­cle of sug­ar cul­ti­va­tion, and the cre­ole cul­ture be­ing cre­at­ed by en­slaved peo­ple and their free coun­ter­parts. Though a planter him­self, in his book West In­dia Scenery he didn't at­tempt to dis­guise the wretched con­di­tions un­der which en­slaved peo­ple lived.

In The Colour of Shad­ows, Judy Ray­mond has used Brid­gens's draw­ings and con­tem­po­rary doc­u­ments such as the slave reg­is­ters and the re­ports of the Pro­tec­tor of Slaves, to tell the sto­ry of slav­ery in Trinidad in the last years be­fore Eman­ci­pa­tion, fo­cus­ing on the peo­ple who lived on Richard and Maria Brid­gens' St Clair es­tate.

She has al­so un­earthed pre­vi­ous­ly un­known facts about Brid­gens's life and work, some of his un­pub­lished im­ages, and about what be­came of his fam­i­ly af­ter his death in Port-of-Spain in 1846.

Ray­mond, a for­mer ed­i­tor-in-chief of the T&T Guardian, has writ­ten two pre­vi­ous bi­o­graph­i­cal stud­ies of lo­cal artists, jew­eller Bar­bara Jar­dine and fash­ion de­sign­er Meil­ing, a re­lease said.

The Colour of Shad­ows: Im­ages of Caribbean Slav­ery is pub­lished by the Caribbean Stud­ies Press of Flori­da.

It will be launched at the Bo­cas Lit Fest on May 1 at 3 pm at the Old Fire Sta­tion, Hart Street, as part of the OCM Bo­cas Lit Fest 2016.