Dorrell, an orphan, sits in the Jamaican home of his adoptive guardian, a white Anglican minister who commissioned the portrait. The boy’s hand rests on a tobacco jar made of Lignum vitae, a wood commonly found on the island; on the table are locally grown citrus fruits. Posing his sitter alongside the country’s products as well as his guardian’s property, Huie alludes both to Jamaica’s identity apart from its colonizers and to the complex dynamics of colonialism. Huie traveled to London in 1947 to study art, returning home in the 1950s to become Jamaica’s leading artist after Independence. In 1958, Dorrell immigrated to Britain, one of half a million Caribbean people known as the “Windrush generation,” recruited by the government to help rebuild the nation’s economy after World War II. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2025
