James Gay Sawkins

1806-1878

James Gay Sawkins (1806–1878), born in Southampton, was a painter and geologist whose life moved between the two disciplines. Trained by no school but his own travels, he supported himself as a portraitist and landscape painter in Mexico, Cuba, and the Caribbean during the 1830s and 40s, teaching drawing and selling views in St Thomas, where his work is said to have left an early impression on the young Camille Pissarro. He later worked mines and surveys in Hawaii, Australia, and Peru, and painted a portrait of Queen Sālote of Tonga after an 1854 earthquake. From 1857 he joined Britain's West Indian Geological Survey, working in Trinidad and then Jamaica under Lucas Barrett, whom he succeeded as director after Barrett's death in 1862. His 1869 Reports on the Geology of Jamaica became a foundational reference for the island's geology. Sawkins's paintings are valued for their careful, observational style, recording places and people without moralising. He died in London in 1878; his work is held today by the Honolulu Museum of Art and the Mission Houses Museum.