A woman artist and plantation slavery in the Royal Collection

By Eleanor Stephenson, PhD candidate in History.

This post is part of Exploring Legacies of Enslavement: a research series, highlighting ongoing research on the legacies of enslavement.

During my PhD research at the University of Cambridge, I stumbled across an extraordinary painting in the Royal Collection. ‘A Cocoa Tree and Roasting Hut’ and the almost identical copy at Dyrham Park depict a cacao tree and a small wooden hut within a landscape. While recent scholarship had re-evaluated its origins, the identity of its creator remained a mystery. Through extensive archival research in the UK and Jamaica, I solved this puzzle, attributing the Royal Collection painting to Vere Lynch (née Herbert) (1647-1682), an early and rare woman painter working in the new English colony of Jamaica. The painting itself - although a material product of the Atlantic slavery system that documented and promoted plantation slavery - is visually silent on the enslaved African labour. It is these two, in this case, conflicting silences, on a woman painter and the exploitation of slavery in Jamaica, that lie at the heart of this research. 

In 2021, Phillip Emanuel and Rupert Goulding successfully challenged the previous attribution of the two paintings to the Dutch artist, Albert Eckhout (c.1610–1665), firmly placing them in 1670s English Jamaica, rather than 1640s Dutch Brazil. This was done by connecting the paintings with two copies of a letter from Sir Thomas Lynch, then Governor of Jamaica, to Sir Robert Moray, a courtier and founder of the Royal Society, dated 2 March 1672. These letters clearly mentioned a ‘Cocoa Tree painted to the Life’ being sent from the colony on a Royal African Company ship to the court of Charles II. However, the authors believed that the artist was ‘inevitably unknown’. This tantalising gap in knowledge - the artist's true identity - presented the very challenge I sought to address. I made it my mission to uncover the artist. 

I sifted through countless fragmentary clues in family correspondence and colonial papers, in private and public collections and archives across the UK, from Claydon House to the Society of Antiquaries of London. It was like piecing together a complex puzzle, often requiring me to interpret subtle hints and overlooked details in male-authored correspondence. 

The breakthrough happened when I discovered a crucial sentence in another letter from Sir Thomas Lynch to Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington, in his role as commissioner for trade (1668-1672), written on the same day as his letter to Moray. At the end of the letter, Lynch described his wife, Vere Lynch, as ‘acting now ye [the] nurse, housekeeper and Paintress, making her as busy as if she had all ye affairs of this New World on her’. This reference to Lady Lynch as a ‘Paintress’ unlocked the multiple other references to his wife painting in his correspondence. From this initial statement, I was able to piece together her practice. With another reference in Sir Thomas Lynch’s correspondence to ‘My Wife sending her Mother a Cocoa Tree Painted’, I was able to attribute the Royal Collection’s A Cocoa Tree and Roasting Hut to this woman painter. 

Vere Lynch: a ‘paintress’ in the early British Empire 

Vere Lynch's life, as I discovered, was uniquely interesting. Born in Rouen, France, in 1647, to royalist parents who had been recently exiled amid the Civil War, Vere spent her early years moving between European courts in Paris and The Hague. This exposed her to a rich cultural environment where elite women often engaged with the arts and sciences. Her mother, Lady Margaret Herbert, was at the centre of a royalist spy network. Her older half-sisters were also extremely well-connected, hosting salons in Paris in the mid-1650s, attended by John Evelyn and others.

After her marriage to Sir Thomas Lynch and her move to Jamaica in 1671, Vere Lynch continued to sketch, paint, and practice herbology, drawing on the tropical flora around her. Although now lost, references in her husband’s correspondence indicate that Lady Lynch corresponded with Moray about distilling Lignum vitae as a remedy for her sick half-sister in England. In addition to the ‘Cocoa Tree’, Vere painted the ‘fruits’ of vanilla, achiote, cotton, cashews, mamey sapote, and pimento pepper. Despite endless searching, these colonial still-life paintings are lost to time. 

‘A Cocoa Tree and Roasting Hut’ is a truly remarkable artefact. Vere Lynch’s keen observations captured the intricate details of Theobroma cacao, from the lichens on its trunk to the ripening pods and the cocoa beans undergoing fermentation and curing. I found her work significantly enhanced European visual knowledge of the cacao tree at that time. However, like the colonial project it served, the painting represents a complex and miserable story. Though meticulous in its depiction of cocoa husbandry, the painting conspicuously erases the enslaved African men and women whose hard labour made such production possible. By 1673, Jamaica's population included an estimated 9,504 enslaved African people, making up the vast majority of the island's population and workforce. It was their forced labour that generated the profits enabling Lynch’s social standing and Vere Lynch’s leisure time for artistic pursuits, and it was the trans-Atlantic slave trade that facilitated the movement of her artwork to Whitehall. 

After several years of living in London, in 1688, Vere Lynch’s painting, then known as ‘The Chocolate Tree’, appeared in an inventory of Windsor Castle. Sir Thomas Lynch actively sought to convince the metropolitan elite to invest in Jamaica’s plantation slavery system. While the Royal Collection’s painting was intended for the King, Lynch simultaneously aimed to sway other key figures. It is, therefore, surely no coincidence that the copy is in the collection at Dyrham Park and was probably once owned by two colonial administrators and investors, Thomas Povey and his nephew, William Blathwayt, who Lynch almost convinced to set up cocoa plantations in Jamaica. Both versions of the painting serve as examples of how visual culture was entangled in the promotion of plantation slavery. These landscapes depict a romanticised, sanitised view of the colonial plantation that starkly omits the enslaved labour underpinning it. My work sought to bring this invisible, yet fundamental presence to the forefront of the narrative. 

The research in Jamaica was made possible with support from The Lisa Jardine Grant, Faculty Fieldwork Fund, and the Economic History Society. My article, ‘Vere Lynch (née Herbert) (1647-1682): The Stuart Court Painter of Early English Jamaica’, will be published in Huntington Library Quarterly, 88, nos. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2025).

About the author
Eleanor Stephenson is a PhD student in the Faculty of History and the recipient of an AHRC‑funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with the Royal Society and the University of Cambridge. Her research investigates the intertwined roles of art and science in the early British Empire, focusing on the Royal Society and slavery in Jamaica.