Eugène Foullon d’Ecotier must have commissioned this portrait after his appointment in June 1785 as Intendant of Guadeloupe and before his departure for the French colony that November. In the interim, Vestier showed it at the Salon of 1785. Vestier’s tendency to pick out minute details is evident in his depictions of the map of Guadeloupe and the Ordonnances de la Marine, a publication that outlined regulations for colonial administration. The enslaved labor producing the sugar and cacao that made Guadeloupe so lucrative for the French economy is unacknowledged by these props. In the late 1780s, Guadeloupe’s population included over eighty-six thousand enslaved men and women.
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