| Sumario: | "Three Sketches of Character: The Legacy of Isaac Mendes Belisario" synthesizes the existing scholarship on the Jamaican Jewish artist Isaac Mendes Belisario to appreciate his often contradictory legacy. It identifies two historiographical positions on Belisario. First, Belisario's Sketches of Character is racialized art essentializing his Black subjects. Second, Belisario's Sketches captures a celebratory and utopian vision of post-Emancipation Jamaica. This article argues that these two perspectives are a false binary, as both are true at the same time. It advances a third option from a social-historical perspective: that Sketches might be categorized as a work of "Jewish art," suggesting that Jewish art might be devoid of Jewish themes, and even present as Black, yet be the product of a uniquely Jewish diasporic experience.
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